![]() ![]() Newer cabins are frequently built with concrete blocks and aluminum siding, substances less susceptible to fire and rot. A tire store became a cabin the tin roof of a teardown became a kitchen ceiling. In keeping with the founders, many cabin owners pride themselves on building and decorating with salvaged or scavenged materials. “All these things that promote agriculture and horticulture help build up the country,” the Neshoba Democrat noted. Exhibits showcased fertilizer and a mechanical cotton chopper. As the event grew, fairgoers debated advances in farming and delivered discourses: “How I Beat the Boll Weevil.” They competed in home-economics contests-best axe handle, best sponge cake, best “homespun dress made during the Great Civil War”-for prize overalls or ten dollars in gold. The fair started as a one-day picnic in 1889, when some families met to compare and share their livestock, field crops, garden vegetables, and crafts. Someone said, “People have gotten married at the fair,” and someone else said, “Marriages have ended out here, too.” She pointed out the exact spot to me while a meal was in progress, as one always seems to be. Carrie Stokes Atkinson, of Cabin 351, was six weeks old when she attended her first fair, in 1988 she was seventeen when she was crowned Miss Neshoba County at the fair she was thirty-four when, last year, her water broke at the fair, on the kitchen floor. Diehards have not missed a fair since Franklin D. The Minshews, of Cabin 1, are so eager for caramel cake, a family fair specialty, that they start eating it before they’ve finished unloading their cars. Casseroles are cooked and frozen weeks in advance. Cabin 185 is called Mump’s Place because its late matriarch reportedly “thought about the fair for fifty weeks out of the year,” then kept detailed notes on what everybody ate and where they slept. ![]() This year, during the hottest month in human history, I stepped into a frigid, empty-looking bedroom and was startled when a teen-ager rose from an upper bunk in a ghillie suit of blankets.Ĭabin dwellers, like Burning Man fanatics, plan their lives around the fair. ![]() Indoor plumbing and electricity are acceptable-fans and window units blow wide open. Did the fair’s founders watch “American Ninja Warrior”? They did not. Central air-conditioning is heresy, as is television. ![]() The fair is not the place for introverts, neat freaks, sensitives, or anyone who cannot tolerate unrelenting, bone-deep heat. Upper floors resemble bunkhouses: bed after bed after bed. There are food hangovers, and hangover hangovers, and children everywhere, only nobody goes home.Ī lightly occupied fair cabin sleeps twenty-six some sleep sixty. After spraying for bugs, touching up the paint, hanging porch swings, washing linens, changing light bulbs, making beds, and stocking refrigerators (some cabins have four), the families hold the equivalent of Thanksgiving-seven times. The fair, founded in the late eighteen-hundreds in the remote east-central part of the state, has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the coronavirus pandemic because the cabin owners could not bear to give it up. For a week at the end of July, even many who live nearby move to the fairgrounds, creating an instant community of twenty thousand people, three times larger than the population of the county seat, Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair calls itself Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty, because every year the same families return, antlike, to five hundred and ninety-seven individually owned, festively painted cabins there. ![]()
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