Katrina Lutze and her Hampshire lamb at the Porter County Fair in 1999
Fifteen years ago when my ten year-old daughter Katrina began showing 4-H lambs at the Porter County Fair in Northwest Indiana, her nine year-old cousin David came to visit from suburban Chicago. City boy David swept the aisles between the animal pens so faithfully that the sheep barn won the Cleanest Barn contest.
When we were not at the fairgrounds, David’s mother Emily and I worked on an idea for a book we called “Girls of the Plank Road,” a story of pioneer Wisconsin featuring the first Racine County Fair. We had fond memories of our own county fair days, and my daughter’s Hampshire lamb was descended from the sheep that Emily and our brothers and sisters and I had shown in the 1970’s as members of the Yorkville 4-H Club.
Back then, the sheep and many of the other animals were exhibited in tents, but today the fairgrounds features an extensive array of permanent structures, including a long row of livestock barns. The Plank Road families of the nineteenth century would be amazed to see what enormous enterprises the county fairs of the Midwest have become.
Today the Racine County Fairgrounds looks considerably different from the open fields in which the first county fair took place in the 1850s.
Plank Road Stories 