"The Consummation of Rural Prosperity and Happiness": New England Agricultural Fairs and the Construction of Class and Gender, 1810-1860

In 1902, William Dean Howells recounted a trip to a New England county fair for the readers of Harper’s. On the morning of the fair, “heavily laden special trains” converged “from every quarter, across the green fields and through the mantling woods,” transforming the small manufacturing town where the fair was held. But if the “air was electric with the holiday emotion,” the fair failed to live up to its promise, for it was dominated by spectacles and entertainments of the lowest sort. Fairgoers rallied at the trotting races, “which never had the picturesqueness of the running race.” They flocked to the Midway (“that perpetual and universal gift to the State and country fairs from the great Columbian Fair at Chicago”) to be entertained by “monsters, marvels, fortune tellers, [and] dancers.”

The problem with these diversions was not simply that they were coarse, although Howells did take special offense at the “Egyptian” dancers who “wriggle[d] through obscene dances” across every midway in America. Instead, races and midways distracted men and women from exhibits of animals, produce, and domestic manufactures—exhibits that should have exercised a “superior claim upon the civilized spectator.” Howells walked through nearly deserted halls of fine fowl, sheep, and cattle; “more forsaken” still were the “exhibitors of agricultural implements, or fine arts, or rare fruits and vegetables, or floral products or field crops.” Seduced by the excitement of the trotting race and the exoticism of the midway, spectators had abandoned the heart of the nineteenth-century American agricultural fair. Along the way, they had abandoned something essential about rural life itself. ¹

It was neither nostalgia nor hyperbole that prompted Howells to imbue earlier fairs with the timeless traditions of America’s rural past. For those fairs, or cattle shows as they were called, had been carefully constructed to evoke a sense of tradition. Indeed, to read contemporary accounts of antebellum cattle shows is to take a lesson in what Eric Hobsbawm termed the “invention of tradition.” The New England agricultural societies that organized the shows may have been dedicated to scientific progress and agricultural improvements. But as public rituals, cattle shows were calculated to create a sense of continuity with the past. ²

Year after year, agricultural society officers and their townsmen congratulated themselves on their “noble” cattle and “superior” swine, on their “improving” speeches and uplifting sermons. The fairs varied from year to year and from county to county. Over time, they became more elaborate, including a growing number of spectacles and diversions. Still, when the Massachusetts Hampshire Gazette and Courier honored the forty-second anniversary of the “ancient” Tri-County Agricultural Society in 1860 by reprinting descriptions of its first two fairs, readers throughout New England would have recognized the fair’s structure as well as the language used to describe the fair. ³ The annual assemblies of oxen, cattle, and swine testified to the prosperity of the independent yeoman, while plowing matches evidenced his strength. And should the message be lost, orators, preachers, agricultural reformers, and journalists proclaimed his virtue. Obscuring the changes wrought by the development of rural capitalism, cattle shows and the discourses surrounding them helped construct a pastoral vision of the nineteenth-century yeoman and the New England village. ⁴

Yet exhibits of domestic manufactures, which played a central role in antebellum cattle shows, offered New Englanders a picture of rural society at odds with this vision. While animal exhibits, speeches, and sermons paid homage to the timeless truths of rural life, exhibits of domestic manufactures offered nagging evidence that those truths were not eternal. Before 1830, these exhibits emphasized textile production, evoking the gender roles and social relations that obtained in the household economy. But as rural households shifted their allegiance to factory-produced cloth, and samples of homemade linen and wool dwindled in the fairs’ exhibition halls, New Englanders were forced to concede the erosion of domestic manufactures. They were forced, however reluctantly, to confront change in the midst of a ritual aimed at creating tradition...