The Iowa State Fair: Every August, the State Comes Home

Every August, roughly one million people come to the Iowa State Fair. They come from all one hundred counties in Iowa. They come from neighboring states. They come because the fair, which has been running since eighteen fifty-four, is one of the oldest and largest agricultural expositions in the United States, and because it has become, over a hundred and seventy years, the most reliable annual gathering point of Iowa's particular culture.

The fairgrounds on the east side of Des Moines occupy more than four hundred acres. The Grand Concourse, the original ceremonial entrance boulevard, was laid out in the early twentieth century and still anchors the physical layout. The buildings are a mix of permanent exposition halls and livestock barns, and the smell of the place, corn dogs, livestock, and cut grass, is specific enough that Iowans who grew up attending the fair will recognize it for the rest of their lives.

The fair's signature food is the pork chop on a stick, grilled fresh at the Iowa Pork Producers booth, a tradition that reflects the agricultural economy that the fair was built to celebrate. Iowa consistently produces more pork than any other state. The pig competition livestock judging, which sounds like a niche agricultural activity, draws crowds large enough to fill a decent-sized arena.

The playwright Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein set their musical, simply titled State Fair, at a fictionalized Iowa version of this fair. The nineteen forty-five film version, later adapted for stage, drew directly from the imagery of the Iowa State Fair: the butter cow sculpture, the pie-baking competition, the midway lights. The butter sculpture tradition, a full-sized cow carved from six hundred pounds of butter, has been a fair fixture in its modern form since nineteen eleven at Iowa.

The fair is also, in presidential election years, a political audition. Candidates from both parties have worked the fair circuit since at least the nineteen seventies, eating the foods, shaking the hands, and being photographed with the butter cow. The Iowa State Fair and the Iowa caucuses, held six months apart every four years, have made Des Moines one of the most intensely covered political cities in the country for one concentrated season.