The Great Allentown Fair: Labor Day and Livestock Since 1852
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
Every year around Labor Day, Allentown acquires a temporary second identity. The fairgrounds on Seventeenth Street fill up with livestock exhibitions, carnival rides, food stands, grandstand acts, and roughly a third of a million visitors who come to what is formally known as the Great Allentown Fair, one of the oldest continuously running agricultural fairs in the United States.
It started simply enough. The Lehigh County Agricultural Society held its first fair from October sixth to October eighth, eighteen fifty-two, on a five-acre plot east of Fourth Street in Allentown, an open lawn that was then at the edge of the settled city. The point was practical: to showcase agricultural advancements to farmers who needed to know what was working, and to give the surrounding rural community a reason to come to town.
The fair outgrew its original site quickly. In eighteen eighty-nine, the Lehigh County Agricultural Society purchased a larger plot on Seventeenth Street between Chew and Liberty Streets, the location that is still used today. The new fairgrounds allowed for real expansion.
In nineteen eleven, a grandstand seating seven thousand and seventy people was built at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars, primarily to host horse racing and the new automobile races that were drawing crowds across Pennsylvania. For more than forty years the grandstand remained a racing venue. Then, in nineteen fifty-six, the fair booked its first musical act. Guy Lombardo played. Others followed.
By the time Billy Joel performed here in the nineteen eighties, the grandstand was a regional concert destination. The agricultural mission never went away. The livestock shows, the four-H competitions, the agricultural displays are still there. But the fair had become something larger: a civic ritual that the Lehigh Valley marks as the end of summer the way other places mark the first snow. It has run for more than one hundred and seventy years, with pauses only for the Civil War, both World Wars, and the twenty twenty pandemic.
