The Missouri State Fair: Sedalia's Annual Claim to Statehood

Missouri's legislature created the state fair in eighteen ninety-nine, and Sedalia beat out several competing cities by donating a hundred and fifty acres and winning the bidding. The first fair opened here on September ninth, nineteen oh one, drawing twenty-five thousand visitors over five days despite a devastating drought that left most farmers with little to show. The fair never left.

Held every August in this central-Missouri city, it grew into one of the Midwest's premier agricultural showcases, with Art Deco exhibition buildings that still anchor the fairgrounds. The Missouri State Fair has run every year of its existence except nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-four during the Second World War, functioning as an annual register of what the state grows, makes, and values.