Brooklyn Fair
annual agricultural fair

The Brooklyn Fair is an annual agricultural fair held in Brooklyn, Connecticut, for the first time in 1809. It is considered the oldest agricultural fair in the United States.
The fair is organized by the Windham County Agricultural Society
History
In 1809, the first year of the fair, it was held on the site of what is currently known as the Vanilla Bean Cafe
In the following years, the event was hosted in rotation in Woodstock, Brooklyn, and Pomfret, Connecticut
About 10 years after the first fair, in 1820, the ~100 founders incorporated in the Windham County Agricultural Society.
In the year 2000 the Society was recognized for its efforts by the Library of Congress in its "Bicentennial Local Legacies Project" as part of its 200th Anniversary celebration.
No fair was held in 1917–18 because of World War I, 1942–45 because of World War II, or 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Brooklyn Fair” enters the record as annual agricultural fair. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brooklyn, Fair and annual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q4974825. Authority coordinates are 41.780, -71.954. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1809, 1820, 2000 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brooklyn Fair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.