Elkanah Watson House: Father of the County Fair
Near Burlington, New York
The granite house at Port Kent along Lake Champlain was the final home of Elkanah Watson, one of the more quietly consequential Americans of the early republic. Born in Plymouth in seventeen fifty-eight, Watson was a Revolutionary War patriot, a banker, a correspondent of the first four presidents, and the man who invented the American county agricultural fair.
The idea came to him in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, around eighteen oh eight, when he tied two merino sheep to a tree on the village common. The crowd that gathered to see the unusual animals gave him the notion: organize a fair where animals could be exhibited and farming methods compared. The first true agricultural fair ran in Pittsfield in eighteen ten. Within a generation, the model had spread across every state. Watson moved to Port Kent in his later years and died here in eighteen forty-two. His home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen sixty-six.
