Kansas State Fair

Coordinates: 38°04′40″N 97°55′38″W / 38.07778°N 97.92722°W / 38.07778; -97.92722

Kansas State Fair is a State Fair that is held annually, starting the Friday following Labor Day in September, and lasts for 10 days at the Kansas State Fairgrounds in Hutchinson, Kansas, United States. It is the largest single event in the State, and annually attracts approximately 335,000 people from all 105 Kansas counties and several other states.

The fairgrounds is centered at 23rd Ave, between Main St and Plum St, in Hutchinson, and consists of 280 acres with over 70 buildings, and 25 full-time year-round staff.

The 2016 State Fair will be from September 9 through September 18.

History

Early State Fairs

In the 19th century, the Kansas State Fair was held in various cities in Kansas, such as Topeka, Wichita, and others.

Early Reno County Fairs

The first fair association was made on January 18, 1873, when Reno County Agricultural Society was created. On September 23–24, 1873, the society hosted a fair which was held in a small wooden livery stable behind the bank on the northwest corner of Sherman and Main in Hutchinson.

State fair

A state fair is an annual competitive and recreational gathering of a U.S. state's population, usually held in late summer or early fall. It is a larger version of a county fair, often including only exhibits or competitors that have won in their categories at the more-local county fairs.

State fairs began in the nineteenth century for the purpose of promoting state agriculture, through competitive exhibitions of livestock and display of farm products. As the U.S. evolved from a predominantly agrarian to an industrial society in the twentieth century, modern state fairs have expanded to include carnival amusement rides and games, display of industrial products, automobile racing, and entertainment such as musical concerts. Large fairs can admit more than a million visitors over the course of a week or two. The first U.S. state fair was that of New York, held in 1841 in Syracuse, and has been held annually to the present year. The second state fair was in Detroit, Michigan, which ran from 1849 to 2009.

Ulmus parvifolia 'State Fair'

The Chinese Elm cultivar Ulmus parvifolia 'State Fair' was cloned from a tree growing in the grounds of the Oklahoma State Fair, Oklahoma City.

Description

The tree is distinguished by its orbicular crown, dense foliage and attractive exfoliating bark.

Pests and diseases

The species and its cultivars are highly resistant, but not immune, to Dutch elm disease, and unaffected by the Elm Leaf Beetle Xanthogaleruca luteola .

Cultivation

Listed originally by the Sunshine Nursery, Clinton, Oklahoma, in 1994, it is not known to be in cultivation in Europe or Australasia.

Accessions

None known.

References

State Fair (novel)

State Fair is a 1932 novel by Phil Stong about an Iowa farm family's visit to the Iowa State Fair, where the family's two teenage children each fall in love, but ultimately break up with their respective new loves and return to their familiar life back on the farm. Thomas Leslie, the author of Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town, wrote that the novel State Fair is "a surprisingly dark coming-of-age story that took as its major plot device the effects of the 'worldly temptations' of the Iowa State Fair on a local farming family", capturing tensions between urban Des Moines and rural Iowa.

The novel became a bestseller and established Stong as a popular author. Shortly after its publication, the novel was made into a Hollywood film starring Will Rogers (albeit with the addition of a happy "Hollywood ending" not in the book), and was subsequently adapted for the stage and screen several more times, including as a Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musical in 1945.

Plot

The novel follows the Frake family from the fictional town of Brunswick, Iowa. The father, Abel, has a Hampshire boar named "Blue Boy" that he thinks can win the grand championship at the Iowa State Fair. At the beginning of the story, he bets the local Storekeeper that "Blue Boy" will win the grand prize and that the Frakes will all have a good time at the fair and be better off for it when the fair is over. The pessimistic Storekeeper accepts the bet, but also bets that if he (the Storekeeper) loses, something "worse than anything you can think of" will have happened to the Frakes at the fair unbeknownst to Abel.

Kansas

Kansas ⁱ/ˈkænzəs/ is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind", although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans". For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue.

When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed, and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas grew rapidly when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 34th most populous of the 50 United States.

Kansas State University

Kansas State University, commonly shortened to Kansas State or K-State, is a public research university with its main campus in Manhattan, Kansas, United States. Kansas State was opened as the state's land-grant college in 1863 – the first public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas. It had a record high enrollment of 24,766 students for the Fall 2014 semester.

Branch campuses are in Salina and Olathe. The Kansas State University Polytechnic Campus in Salina is home to the College of Technology and Aviation. The Olathe Innovation Campus is the academic research presence within the Kansas Bioscience Park, where graduate students participate in research bioenergy, animal health, plant science and food safety and security.

The university is classified as a research university with high research (RU/H) by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Kansas State's academic offerings are administered through nine colleges, including the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Technology and Aviation in Salina. Graduate degrees offered include 65 master's degree programs and 45 doctoral degrees.

Kansas River

The Kansas River (also known as the Kaw; via French Cansez from kką:ze, the name of the Kaw (or Kansas) tribe) is a river in northeastern Kansas in the United States. It is the southwestern-most part of the Missouri River drainage, which is in turn the northwestern-most portion of the extensive Mississippi River drainage. Its name (and nickname) come from the Kanza (Kaw) people who once inhabited the area. The state of Kansas was named for the river.

The river valley averages 2.6 miles (4.2 km) in width, with the widest points being between Wamego and Rossville, where it is up to 4 miles (6.4 km) wide, then narrowing to 1 mile (1.6 km) or less in places below Eudora. Much of the river's watershed is dammed for flood control, but the Kansas River is generally free-flowing and has only minor obstructions, including diversion weirs and one low-impact hydroelectric dam.

Course

Beginning at the confluence of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers, just east of aptly named Junction City (1,040 feet or 320 metres), the Kansas River flows some 148 miles (238 km) generally eastward to join the Missouri River at Kaw Point (718 feet or 219 metres) in Kansas City. Dropping 322 feet (98 m) on its journey seaward, the water in the Kansas River falls less than 2 feet per mile (38 cm/km). The Kansas River valley is only 115 miles (185 km) long; the surplus length of the river is due to meandering across the floodplain. The river's course roughly follows the maximum extent of a Pre-Illinoian glaciation, and the river likely began as a path of glacial meltwater drainage.