The WannaBeatles, an award-winning Beatles tribute band, are the featured entertainment at AngelFest in downtown Sewanee, Tenn., on Friday night.Folks who love to bake, sew and grow will vie for blue-ribbon bragging rights when the Hamilton County Fair is held Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 27-28, at Chester Frost Park.
This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the Chester Frost Park fair. Baby boomers may remember county fairs held in Warner Park from 1945 to 1969 where a swing band played on the bandstand nightly and a small midway offered rides and carnival games. That was actually the second incarnation of a Hamilton County Fair in Warner Park – the first one launching in 1915 and ending in the early 1920s, according to Hamilton County Parks and Recreation Department history.
The fair moved to a tract of land at the intersection of Bonny Oaks and Hickory Valley Road from 1970 to 1974 before the Chattanooga Jaycees hosted the event from 1976 to 1982 on property off Amnicola Highway. The county fair wasn’t held again until 1990, a one-day event in Chester Frost Park. However, the popularity of its old-fashioned family entertainment resulted in continued growth until it became the two-day event it is now with crowds averaging more than 50,000 a weekend.
This county fair offers more than 100 agricultural, livestock and home-centered categories of competition, according to Maureen Davis, recreation programming specialist for Hamilton County Parks and Recreation. It’s a chance for city slickers to get up close to cows, horses, pigs and rabbits, see the county’s biggest watermelon or talk with farmers about their field crops.
In honor of the fair’s silver anniversary, an anniversary challenge has been added in home-centered categories. Competitors must use their medium to create either something visitors see at the fair, a favorite fair memory or use the number 25 in an unusual way. Challenge winners will be awarded a special ribbon custom-designed for this year’s fair, Davis says.