Today is the Tuesday after Labor Day, which means Hopkinton State Fair wrapped up this weekend without me, and I’m feeling that specific late summer sting of watching the calendar tip over into fall faster than I planned for. Hopkinton is the biggest fair in the state by attendance, technically bigger than Deerfield, and I missed it this year…again. There’s always next year. There’s also, apparently, always a reason I don’t make it to the one that happens before I’ve mentally clocked that fair season has started.
Here’s the thing not all fairgoers will admit. Not every fall event with a Ferris wheel is a fair. A fair, a real one, comes out of an agricultural society. It has a livestock building where someone’s kid has been getting up at five in the morning all summer to prep a rabbit for judging, and a judge who genuinely does not care whose kid it is. It has a pulling ring where the crowd goes quiet and then roars. It has jam and honey and pickles lined up in mason jars with handwritten cards, competing for a ribbon that means something to exactly the people standing in that building and nobody else, which is precisely why it matters.
My cousins in Ohio actually lived that version. Rabbits, goats, the whole 4-H circuit, showing animals they’d raised themselves. I was the city kid who visited in the summer and thought the whole operation was slightly magical but always had to go home for the start of school before the actual fair happened. But if I’m honest about where the real obsession comes from, it’s less based in real life than that. It’s sick days home from school, flipping channels to AMC, watching Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair for the tenth time. I will still, given the right stretch of fair traffic, break into “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” purely to torture my teenagers, who have made it extremely clear this is not appreciated.
A harvest festival gives you a hayride and a craft table. A fair gives you a hundred years of a farming county’s pride, wrapped around a midway,sprinkled with experimental cuisine and the same snacks that have people pleasers forever. Once you’ve felt the difference, you can’t unfeel it.
I’ve been going to our regional fairs for about 20 years now, and I’ve been paying closer attention to the New Hampshire and Maine ones since I landed near Lovell Lake. Here’s where I’d actually spend a Saturday, what each one is actually like once you’re standing in it, and who each one is for.
Topsfield Fair — The One That Started It For Me
Topsfield is the fair I know best, and it’s not even in this state. It’s over the Massachusetts line, on the North Shore-ish, and it’s the oldest county fair in the country, which you can feel the second you’re through the gate. Not because it feels particularly old. Because it feels like it’s been getting this right for two centuries and has no plans to stop.
It’s chaos, and I mean that as a compliment. The crowd is thick enough that you stop trying to walk in a straight line and just let the current take you. Fried food smell hits you before you’ve paid for parking. I have a strict no fried food rule for myself, most days of the year, except at a fair, where the rule simply does not apply. Something on a stick is non negotiable. I don’t ask what it is anymore, I just get in the longest line and trust my fellow fairgoers.
But the part that gets me every time isn’t the midway. It’s the exhibition halls. Rows of quilts, jars of jam with a ribbon or without one, a woman explaining to a stranger exactly how she got her chutney that color. I go in for the rides and I leave thinking about pigs I don’t have the skills to care for (yet!). If you’ve ever wondered where my interest in homesteading actually started, it’s booths like these. Years of walking past them clearly did something.
This one is for anyone who wants the full sensory overload version of a fair. Big crowds, real chaos, and worth every minute of the parking wait.
Deerfield Fair — New Hampshire’s Own
Deerfield is what people mean when they picture a New Hampshire fair in their head, and it earns that reputation honestly. It’s the oldest agricultural fair in the state, it runs the first weekend of October when the foliage is doing its best work, and the fairgrounds are old enough to be genuinely historic rather than dressed up to look that way.
What makes Deerfield different from the bigger fairs is scale. You can actually cover it in a day without feeling like you missed half the fair. The livestock shows are serious, the ox pulling draws a real crowd that gets loud in a way that surprises first timers, and the food, apple crisp, maple bacon fried dough, cider donuts made right there, is the kind of thing you plan your walking route around. Don’t miss the sheep shearing, its a whole thing in and of itself. If you want one fair that captures what makes this whole tradition worth defending, and you don’t want to commit an entire week to it, this is the one.
Go early in the run if you can. Thursday and Friday crowds are a different experience than Saturday, when the whole state, and half of Massachusetts, seems to show up at once.
Sandwich Fair — The One In My Backyard
Sandwich is close enough to home that it doesn’t feel like an event I plan for so much as one that someone pings me a text about one afternoon and we just go. It’s smaller than Deerfield, smaller than Fryeburg by a wide margin, and that’s the whole appeal. It sits at the foothills of the White Mountains, it happens over Columbus Day weekend, and it still runs like a town fair even though everyone in three counties knows about it.
There’s a parade through the middle of it, an antique auto procession one day and a proper street parade the next, and the fairgrounds themselves are unpretentious in a way that feels just right for this part of the state. Cattle sheds, oxen barns, a skillet toss competition that draws more genuine enthusiasm than makes sense and always makes me think of that song from Chicago, “He Had It Coming.” In any case, Sandwich is a fair that hasn’t tried to become anything bigger than what it already is, and I respect that.
This is the one for someone who wants the real thing without the crowd math of a major fair. Bring layers. Once the sun starts going down in that valley, the temperature drops fast.
Fryeburg Fair — Know What You’re Signing Up For
Fryeburg is Maine’s answer to all of this, and it is not a smaller version of anything. It runs for eight full days, right around the state line, close enough to the Lakes Region that plenty of my neighbors treat it as a local tradition rather than a road trip. The scale is genuinely different from every fair I’ve named so far. Livestock shows that run all week, the largest ox and steer competition of its kind anywhere, and a midway that takes real effort to see in a single visit.
People camp out across from the fairgrounds for the whole run, which tells you something about the commitment level of a true Fryeburg regular. This isn’t a fair you casually pop into for an afternoon. It’s basically the Disney World of fairs, second in my personal experience only to the Minnesota State Fair, which is unique in its awesomeness. Go in with a plan, or go in accepting you’ll only see a fraction of it and that’s fine too. Weekday visits are dramatically calmer than the closing weekend, which draws the kind of crowd that turns the whole town of Fryeburg into one ginormous parking lot.
How To Actually Do This
Here’s what I’ve learned after enough Octobers of this. You cannot do it all, at any single fair, in a single visit. There is always another barn, another ring, another vendor row you didn’t get to. The trick isn’t trying to see everything. It’s looking at the schedule ahead of time and deciding what’s not for you this year, so you’re not standing in the middle of a field at 3pm trying to make that decision on the fly. I recently found a note in my phone’s app that I made to myself at the 2024 Fryeburg Fair. It read: “next year, come early. see sheep, maybe buy? eat churros first no kamikaze.” So I guess that’s what I’ll do this year.
If you’re going to any of the fairs, plan to sit in traffic. Genuinely, budget for it. It’s not a flaw in the day, it’s just part of the day, and honestly, a captive audience for showtunes. And, check the weather but like a true New Englander, know that it’s never bad, it just requires different clothes.
If this made you think of the person in your life who’d fight for a caramel apple, send it their way.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
