Yavapai County Fair

From September 10 to 13, 2026, the carnival stood on the Prescott Rodeo Grounds and kept its own hours. Its rides opened at 6 p.m. on Thursday, 4 p.m. on Friday, and 10 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, apart from the fair gates. The rides belonged to Brown’s Amusements, which the fair thanked afterward “for always lighting up our fair!” The 2026 fair carried the theme “Honoring Tradition & Celebrating the Future.” The Yavapai Fair Foundation sells its tickets, and Rosalee Darby is listed as its general manager.

Four days at the rodeo grounds

Thursday opened with bull riding in the arena and the country artist Chancey Williams on the stage. Friday was Hispanic Night on the stage and Family Fun Night in the arena, where the program included greased pig races. Children could be entered in the arena for Mutton Busting, Greased Pigs, and Catch A Chicken. A poster called Dog Town USA and Beyond reported that its “Hot Dog & Hamburger” had run the pig chase. “They didn’t officially get one but they def had them a few times!”

On Saturday the stage held tribute performances to Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, and Journey. The GCPRA Rodeo took the arena that day and the next. At 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 12, the Youth Livestock Auction began, in which local residents and businesses bid on animals raised by young people from around the county. The fair later posted, “Our Auctioneers understood the assignment!”

Sunday began at 9 a.m. with GCPRA Rodeo slack in the arena and a large livestock judging contest. A small stock judging contest followed at 10. Rabbits and smaller animals went before the judges in costume at 11:30, the large stock at noon, and a Showmanship Palooza at 1:30. The rodeo closed the fair at 3 p.m. A petting zoo ran through the day.

Quilts, pies, and a dahlia

The exhibit halls hold artwork, photography, home arts, and other entries from county residents. In Darby’s account of the 2019 fair, written for Prescott LIVING Magazine, the fair has been since 1913 a place for residents “to exhibit original crafts, garden goods, recipes, photographs and animals they have proudly produced.” She added, “I love the fair because it is really the only local place for all to celebrate and showcase their accomplishments.”

Her account names the 2019 entrants. Norma Kurr showed a quilt that took ten years to finish. She had started quilting classes more than a decade earlier, but her sewing machine broke, and the classes ended before the quilt was done. She enrolled again. In the end a woman named Georgia helped her finish it, and Patsy Franko did the quilting on her own machine. The quilt took a blue ribbon and the Yavapai County Fair President Award.

In the Home Department, 12-year-old Ashley Lee entered a pecan pie made from a third-generation recipe. She had watched her mother, Melissa, bake it every holiday, as Melissa had watched her own mother. Mother and daughter each entered a pie. “We didn’t want to make the same pie,” Melissa said. She put Jack Daniels in hers in place of the vanilla. Both pies won awards. Photography had 120 more entries that year than the year before. Its People’s Choice Award went to Ryan Closson of Prescott for a picture of Crystal Mill in Colorado. In Floriculture, Hilary Horton of Prescott took Best of Show with a dahlia she had worked on all year.

Darby wrote that youth livestock exhibitors typically spend eight to twelve months caring for the animals and projects they enter. The 2019 grand champions included Riley Solo’s market steer and market lamb, Sophia Davidson’s market swine, and Danielle Davis’s market goat. The arena that year held a working ranch horse competition, a ranch rodeo with branding and sorting, and NFR Jr. Bull Riding. Ned LeDoux played the Saturday stage.

Five counties and the Dougherty Tract

The fair began with a meeting of five counties. On August 7, 1913, the Northern Arizona Fair Association formally organized and adopted bylaws. Its 25 directors came five each from Yavapai, Mohave, Coconino, Navajo, and Apache counties. Membership cost $2.50, and two hundred people joined within ten days. The account is that of Danny Freeman, a longtime supporter and historian of the fair and of Prescott’s rodeo, writing for the Sharlot Hall Museum in 1999.

The first fair was held October 27, 28, and 29, 1913, on the Dougherty Tract near Prescott. The organizers chose those dates to leave four days for taking down the exhibits and getting them to Phoenix for the Arizona State Fair. The Santa Fe Railway, whose line crossed all five counties, gave fairgoers special fares and gave exhibitors special rates to ship their entries. The fair made a profit, and the directors bought the ground. Joe Dougherty sold them 45 acres at $100 an acre. He also gave an option on 40 more acres to the west, which the association never exercised. Cowboy contests and horse races had already been held on the same Dougherty grounds that July.

On January 7, 1919, the group became the Northern Arizona State Fair Association. Its new bylaws stated its purpose “to advance the agriculture, mining, stock-raising and other interests of the Counties of Mohave, Coconino, Navajo and Yavapai....”

During the Depression, the association gave the land to the county so that it could get federal help for building. On May 18, 1936, the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors accepted title, with a 25-year lease back to the association. The help bought a 5,000-seat grandstand and two rock exhibit buildings, known today as the Doc Pardee and Freeman buildings. The Prescott Frontier Days history adds the stone Fish Pond and credits the work to the WPA and the CCC. Freeman wrote that, as far as was known, Yavapai was the only county anywhere whose fairgrounds were not managed by the county.

The sources give two versions of the years that followed. Freeman wrote that no fair was held at the fairgrounds after 1932. From 1933 through 1946, County Fair Commissioner Bill Bianconi gathered exhibits for a Yavapai County booth at the State Fair in Phoenix. Freeman counted that as “no break in Yavapai County Fairs since 1913.” The Prescott Frontier Days history says simply that the fair ceased operation from 1933 until 1947. In 1947 a new Yavapai County Fair opened in September, and it has been a September event since. On July 8, 1955, new bylaws gave the association its third name, the Yavapai County Fair Association. In 1999, Freeman counted several thousand people at the fair each year, some from as far as New Mexico and California. He wrote that it took hundreds of volunteers to stage it.

Prescott Downs and the money for the fair

Horses paid for much of this. Prescott had raced horses since 1866, when the town was two years old. The early races were matched races with side bets, first at Forbing Park, about three miles northwest of town. From 1913 they were run at the fairgrounds, just west of Miller Valley Road. In 1939, C.W. “Doc” Pardee, arena director for the Prescott Rodeo, programmed four or five races a day with pari-mutuel equipment brought in from Nevada. That year’s Phoenix Handicap, run July 4, carried a $200 purse presented by Barry Goldwater. Black Beauty won it with Ferris Price up.

In 1949 the legislature authorized pari-mutuel betting so that counties could fund their fairs with racing. The first state-supervised races in Prescott were run during the Yavapai County Fair on September 16 and 17, 1950. The handle for the two days was $3,274. Over the next decades the track passed through several hands:

• The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Posse ran the races from 1950 to 1959.
• A local group, the Yavapai Turf Club, ran them from 1960 to 1963 and named the track Prescott Downs.
• The Funk brothers of Phoenix, Arthur and Dave, bought the Turf Club on November 19, 1963, and spent heavily on the grandstand and track before handing the races back in 1977.
• The Fair Association ran the races from 1978 to 1982 and lost money.
• The Martori brothers, Art and Joe, ran them from 1983 to 1986.
• The Fair Association took the track back in 1987.

In 1992 the association agreed to beam Prescott Downs races to 23 off-track outlets around the state. Freeman called that year the turning point, when the track “began making lots of money.” He wrote that by 1998 the average handle passed $100,000 a day. Racing paid for every improvement at the grounds except the grandstand and the two rock buildings. “Horse racing is where the money comes from to support the fair,” he wrote.

The rodeo shares the same ground. Prescott Frontier Days began in 1913 as a committee of the fair association, the year the July 4th celebration moved to the fairgrounds. By that history’s account, the rodeo has never missed a year since 1888.

In 1999 Freeman reported plans to move the fair and Prescott Downs about 14 miles to new grounds in Prescott Valley. The reasons were that the old grounds were too small for parking and exhibits, and the half-mile track “should be five-eighths.” The rodeo meant to stay. “The separation will be hard on the old-timers,” he wrote, “but as they say - Time Marches On!” Twenty years later, Darby wrote that the fair is held at the Prescott Rodeo Grounds, the same location where it began in 1913.