Utah State Fair: Since Before Statehood
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The Utah State Fair has been running since eighteen fifty-six, forty years before Utah became a state. Brigham Young and the Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society organized the first territorial fair in Salt Lake City to promote farming in a high-desert landscape that challenged even experienced settlers. The fair was meant to prove that the Great Basin could support a self-sufficient community.
It outlasted Utah's territorial era, statehood in eighteen ninety-six, and a pandemic, pausing only in a few lean years and during both world wars. The fairgrounds off North Temple Street have occupied the same general location for generations. Today the fair draws big crowds each fall for livestock competitions, rodeo events, and the kind of deep-fried novelty foods that have become an American county fair tradition.
It remains one of the oldest state fairs west of the Mississippi River.
