Monday, September 28, 2015

Deyerle 2015, Part One: Port Republic and Timberville



Deyerle 2015, Part One:  Port Republic and Timberville

Every fall, the Massanutten Regional Library is pleased to present the Deyerle Lecture Series at the Central Library at 7pm on Thursday nights.  The programs are made possible by a grant from the Dr. Henry Deyerle family.
On Thursday, October 1st, we are going to take a virtual tour of Port Republic and the Port Republic Museum. Before the bridges were burned or flooded, Port Republic was once a bustling town of industry, gundalows, ferries, iron works, canneries, mills, and tanneries.  It is also the original home of Wetsel Seeds.

John Madison, the cousin of James Madison, built Madison Hall in 1751 upon a hill overlooking the fields and rivers.  He created Mount Vernon Furnace, which was the beginning of the iron industry in Port Republic.  The Port Republic Foundry made everything from kettles and fences to the sickle of the famous McCormick Reaper. Unfortunately, it took an entire acre of forest to create one   By 1870, twenty-nine thousand acres were deforested.
ton of pig iron.
Port Republic was registered as a Virginia Historic Landmark in 1966 and was listed in the  National Register of Historic Places in 1976.  Come by the Central Library around 7pm Thursday to find out more.


The following Thursday, on October 8th at 7pm, local historian Bev Garber, author of Timberville: The Early Years, and creator and guide of the Timberville Walking Tour  will guide us through the streets and past of Fort Run, Williamsport, Riddle’s Tavern or now what is commonly known as Timberville.
Did you know that Timberville once had a pillow factory, or that it is the home of the first egg distribution center?  Thanks to the Church of the Brethren, it was also home to an Orphanage and an “Old Folks Home.”    Why did Lindberg choose to land here?  Why was there a German Prisoner of War camp here?  You’ll have to attend the program to find out the answers and much more.



contact Cheryl Metz at
cmetz@mrlib.org

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Baseball in the Valley



With fall approaching many of us are reminded of the changing seasons with cooler days and the hustle of children returning to school. Lives move forward and families quickly settle into daily routines. As October nears, the rest of us turn our attention to baseball. The baseball season is finally coming to a slow and grueling stop after 162 regular season games—games that stretch over the full course of spring, summer, and fall and a national champion will be crowned. Watching the World Series is a special event.

Baseball has captured the imagination of generations and will continue to captivate more. There is something rather simple about a baseball game with its nine innings, twenty-seven outs, and four bases. Players attempt to move from base to base with the hope of scoring a run. Baseball isn’t as complicated as other sports; thereby, making it easy for younger people and newcomers to quickly catch on and enjoy the game. Professional baseball players are less idolized than football stars creating a more individual appeal, making baseball seem more “realistic” and players more approachable.

Baseball’s roots in the Shenandoah Valley can be traced back to when the sport was first invented.

Chaz Weaver’s history of local baseball The Valley Baseball League details the sports beginnings and current standings. The first recorded league was in the spring of 1866. The Staunton Baseball Club was one of the first teams and Harrisonburg quickly followed in July with The Lone Star Base Ball Club. Other leagues cropped up soon after and competition between the towns quickly developed (Weaver 2). Before long there were teams in New Market, Edinburg, Luray, and Woodstock. The development of these teams led to the Valley Baseball League that many still enjoy today.

In 1922 Harrisonburg joined the Valley League as a charter member (Weaver 27). Bleachers were quickly added to the field behind Harrisonburg High School and the field quickly gained the reputation as the best baseball facility in the valley (Weaver 27).  Harrisonburg won the title in their first year which more than verified their presence in the league.  The league shifted teams and jurisdictions throughout the early years causing Harrisonburg to lose the Turks from 1942-1948. This was a major blow to the city where many had quickly become fond of watching baseball during the warmer months.

1950 marks a monumental year with Harrisonburg joining the Valley League again and with the completion of Veterans Memorial Stadium. The stadium was named in honor of local men who lost their lives in World War II (Weaver 29). Throughout the 60s and 70s the Turks would continue a
pattern of success and win six championships. The Turks would go on to win the championship again in 1991, 2002 and 2012.  2008 marked dramatic change for the team. James Madison University purchased the old Harrisonburg High School building and grounds and Veterans Memorial Stadium was demolished. The new field, Eagle Field at Veterans Memorial Stadium seats 1,200 and is a state of the art facility. The Turks have seen tremendous success since moving to the new field and even won the championship in 2012 giving the Harrisonburg Turks a total of eighteen championships (Weaver 32).

This October we invite you stop by the library and check out our baseball display. Mr. Weaver’s book, The Valley Baseball League, will be available for you to borrow along with a generous selection of other baseball titles. We hope you enjoy the World Series by reading something new and enjoying the magic of October.

Weaver, Chaz. The Valley Baseball League, A History of Baseball in the Shenandoah Valley. Lulu Publishing Services, 2014.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

German PWs in Rockingham County, 1944-1945

POWs waiting for ocean transport, from Arnold Krammer's
book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.
Fall is quickly approaching, and in the Valley, that means apples! The Shenandoah Valley has long been an agricultural center, and 70 years ago, our farms and factories were vital to the war effort—part of the “breadbasket of democracy,” as wartime propaganda films called the United States. (Don’t underestimate Rockingham’s importance—in August 1944, Fox Movietone, Pathé News, and MGM came to the Plains district to shoot newsreel footage of Rockingham’s food production and processing. Our turkey flocks, orchards, and processing facilities were broadcast to moviegoers nationwide!) However, the workforce available to harvest and process food was quickly dwindling. The Virginia labor force lost 300,000 able-bodied men to the armed forces, and still more left for higher paying jobs in government and other wartime workplaces. In 1943, state farmers found labor where they could—convicts from state prisons, the Women’s Land Army (a civilian organization), conscientious objectors released from Soil Conservation work, and vacationers from Washington, D.C. all helped bring in the harvest. The 1944 harvest was expected to be a bumper crop, and Rockingham County farmers hoped to use the same sources of labor that they used in 1943, as well as Boy Scouts and school students, for the growing and harvest seasons. County Agricultural Extension Agent Frederick Holsinger also applied to the Army’s Third Service Command at Baltimore for another source to supplement the labor force—German prisoners of war.

According to the 1929 Geneva Convention, prisoners of war (POWs or PWs) could work for the good of their captors, as long as certain criteria were met. First, they had to be either enlisted men or non-commissioned officers. PW labor could not be used for work directly related to the war effort, and all assignments had to meet certain safety guidelines. Lastly, the PWs had to be paid for their work.[1] Prisoners were a guaranteed product of combat in WWII, and keeping them in camps in the European war zone was problematic. The United States had never had so many war captives, and with no practical experience and only theoretical guidelines to work from, it seems they worked things out as they went. Shipping the prisoners back to the U.S. was a logical move. Rather than having to ship more food to Europe or sacrifice provisions meant for American troops, they could use the mostly empty supply ships returning across the Atlantic to ferry prisoners instead.

Branch Camp No. 7, Timberville, Virginia. From
Gregory L. Owen's book Wehrmacht Autumns.
In fact, from 1942 to 1946, close to half a million Italian and German PWs were transported back to American shores. (In May 1945, there were 425,871 PWs in the U.S.—371,683 Germans, 50,273 Italians, and 3,915 Japanese.[2])The first prisoners went to former Civilian Conservation Corps camps, unused parts of military bases, fairgrounds, auditoriums, and tent cities. By the end of the war, 155 more permanent base camps had been established, as well as 511 branch camps when the bases were too few to meet demand. The Italians and Germans were already using American PWs to fill their own labor drains as men went to the war, and the U.S. did the same to free up troops for overseas shipment. The first priority for labor was to military installations for essential war work. In base camps, skilled PWs also did everything from working as medical and dental aids to carpentry and plumbing to road and yard work to tending the camp PX or post office. More than 40 states appealed for help from the government due to workforce shortages, and by November 1944, there were more PWs employed in agricultural work than essential war work—over 115,000 by November 1945. Businesses and chambers of commerce could petition the War Department for labor, and that is what happened in Rockingham County. There is a lot of additional interesting information available about the bureaucratic workings of the PW program, the distribution of prisoners, Nazism in the camps, reeducation, repatriation, and the rest, but I want to focus on the local, small scale of Fort Pickett’s Branch Camp No. 7 in Timberville.

After an initial meeting on June 5, 1944 to ascertain the interest in war prisoner labor, county agent Holsinger set the bureaucratic wheels in motion by submitting a certification of need in order to have prisoners allocated to the area. Branch Camp No. 7 was established on the farm of Herman L. Hollar, three miles west of Timberville, on a field full of jagged limestone that made it good only for grazing, not planting. The facility was planned to accommodate 250 prisoners, 50 soldier guards, and 8 officers. Americans and Germans alike would live in tents at the camp and have separate dining facilities. Local workers installed sewage, water, and electricity to the camp, and the first prisoners to arrive in August 1944 assembled the canvas tents, as well as 8’ barbed wire fences around the perimeter. The fence had gates in the center of the east and west sides, with a road bisecting, plus 8’ guard towers on each corner; the fences and guard towers were the only things in the camp built of wood. Soon the Timberville camp was full of German prisoners, who arrived by open truck with the town’s population lining the streets to watch. Those interested in obtaining PW labor applied to the county agent’s office. If they were assigned men, they would receive instructions about their responsibilities. Employers had to pick up PWs at the camp, though prisoners working at farms as far south as Harrisonburg and Bridgewater were trucked to the Greyhound bus station on North Main Street in Harrisonburg and picked up there. Demand for labor surpassed supply, so labor was allocated based on priorities—harvesting was priority number one. PWs also made hay, hauled in small grain, performed orchard work, cut corn, filled siloes, and worked in industry. (Zigler Canning Cooperative Inc. and Rockingham Poultry Marketing Cooperative Inc. were the two main industrial contractors for the Timberville camp, though PWs also worked at City Produce Exchange, the Harrisonburg Junk and Hide Company, and Mason’s saw mill, as well as food processing plants in the Timberville/Broadway area.) The government set three months as the maximum contract period, so a truck convoy returned the 170 prisoners to Camp Pickett on November 1, 1944. As anticipated, the year was a bumper crop for both apples and peaches, and the harvest might not have been brought in without PW labor. Because of this success, the camp opened again in 1945 from July 16 to November 16, when it served as a branch of the Front Royal base camp under the direction of Lieut. Nathan Mandel.

PWs enjoying a drink. From Arnold Krammer's
book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.
Conditions in the camps were good, partially due to the Geneva Convention and partially due to the prevailing idea that word would get back to Germany and make them more willing to surrender, knowing that conditions would not be bad. Farmers paid the army the prevailing local wage for each worker, and in turn the army paid workers $0.80 per day in canteen checks, which could be used to purchase things like toiletries, candy, soda, the occasional beer, and other items that weren’t scarce to point of shortage. (Any money they did not spend during the war went back to Germany with them.) Prisoners had responsibilities in camp, just as they would in their own barracks. German camp management solved discipline issues internally, and prisoners were accountable for keeping the camp clean. Their food was also prepared by German cooks, who received the same rations that their American counterparts did— coffee, tea, milk, corn flakes, jam, potatoes, rice, meat, fish, vegetables, eggs, and the like. In fact, some prisoners thought they had more food than they needed! Timberville PWs also had regular church services held by alternating local pastors with the aid of a German-speaking Lutheran pastor from Edinburg. (The Rev. Samuel Berry was one of those pastors, and his former church, St. John’s Lutheran Chapel, is now home to the altar made and used by prisoners in their services. It reads “Ehre sei Gott in der hoehe” – “Glory to God in the highest.” The PWs left the altar behind at the end of the war because they wanted a church to be able to use it.) The prisoners were housed, clothed, fed, and offered religious comfort in the beauty of the Valley. Former prisoner Herbert Vogt observed, “The countryside around Timberville is nice and is similar to the countryside around my hometown.”[3]

PW Herman Vogt, who had fond
memories of the Shenandoah
Valley. From Gregory Owen's
book Wehrmacht Autumns.
Vogt was typical of the average PW at the Timberville camp—or at any of the hundreds of camps across the country. He was barely 19 years old when he was captured in France in June 1944. Local resident Benjamin May, who was six years old when the PWs first arrived, remembered the children expecting the Germans to be “ten feet tall and supermen and mean.”[4] Instead, they discovered a group of unthreatening teenagers, not that much older than themselves. The only “escapee” from the Timberville camp was 18-year-old Kurt Krott, who disappeared and then returned 12 hours later, saying he had been sleeping in the woods nearby. Krott was only 5’2” and 107 pounds, and often spoke of being homesick. While there were many critics of the PW program, especially those living near camps who were afraid of escapes or who had family in the military and saw PWs as symbols of the enemy, eventually the Germans were largely accepted because of their strong work ethic, cleanliness, and good manners. One woman who lived on Main Street in Timberville remembered the PWs coming through town in a truck singing melodies in German with good voices on the way to pick tomatoes. Others recalled them singing often while working the farms, seemingly content. “I guess they were happy to be out of the war,” Benjamin May said on the subject years later.[5] John Yeich of Broadway agreed. “They were out of the war…They were pretty happy to be there, I suspect.”[6] The PWs weren’t asked to work any harder or differently than a local man would be; they were often mixed among local workers. They had hourly breaks and square meals—though they were supposed to bring their own lunch from camp, farm wives often prepared home cooked meals for the laborers. Guards for the prisoners at work were often armed with only a sidearm or not at all, and by September 1945, American MP shortages meant none of the industrial work details had a guard at all. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Germans stuck to the rules. PWs at Hollar’s Orchard convinced 13-year-old Jacob Saylor, who delivered water to them, to break the rules and buy them some snuff. He liked to think of German water boys doing the same and getting tobacco for American PWs, because to him the Germans were “just like Americans.”[7]

Prisoners working at Fort Story, Virginia. From Arnold
|Krammer's book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.
The camp, composed largely of impermanent structures, was dismantled after November 1945. The Daily News Record didn’t report the last prisoners leaving when the camp closed, though whether that was due to lack of interest or more pressing news items is impossible to say. In general, branch camps shut down after war and the land and materials were sold at auction. Today, nothing remains of the Timberville PW camp except a few concrete slabs and guard tower foundations on private property along Orchard Drive. The PW program was ultimately successful in feeding, clothing, housing, entertaining, and even reeducating German servicemen. The U.S. government made $100 million profit on prisoner labor in 1944, which made the camps basically self-supporting. PWs contributed immensely to feeding the nation and its men overseas. In seven months over two harvests in Timberville, German PWs provided 26,081 man days of labor, including 5,573 man days in agricultural work and 5,873 man days in food processing in 1944 and 8,202 man days in agricultural work and 6,433 man days in processing in 1945.[8] The experience seems to have been largely positive for the German prisoners as well. A survey of more than 20,000 PWs leaving Camp Shanks, New York showed that “74 percent of the German prisoners of war who were interred in this country left with an appreciation and friendly attitude toward their captors.”[9] Germans who returned home to the Russian Zone often depended on food packages from concerned friends they had made while imprisoned in the U.S., while American and British Zone repatriates often found work with the U.S. Army or American Military government because they had learned English in captivity. Many former PWs returned to visit and relive their days in the camps across the country, including in the Shenandoah Valley. In the late 1970s, Timberville resident Dow Souder ran into a German man at the bank who had brought his wife, friend, and friend’s wife to see the area where he’d been held during the war. At a camp reunion in Texas in the 1950s, former PW Wilhelm Sauerbrei told a reporter, “I’ll tell you, pal, if there is ever another war, get on the side that America isn’t, then get captured by the Americans—you’ll have it made!”[10]

Compared to fighting on the front lines, harvesting apples in the beautiful Valley must have been a positive experience for German PWs. As for Rockingham County residents, meeting “the enemy” in person and seeing that the Germans weren’t much different from the locals may have been equally positive. This is a fascinating part of our county’s history, and I’m grateful to Gregory L. Owen for all the work he has done in researching and recording it. I highly recommend reading his works for more information, particularly Wehrmacht Autumns: German Prisoners of War in the Plains District of Rockingham County, Virginia During World War II, which is available at Massanutten Regional Library in the Genealogy room (GEN 940.412 O).

by Kristin Noell

[1] See 1929 Geneva Convention, part III, third section, articles 27-34 for more information on PW labor
[2] Owen, HRHS Newsletter, 1.
[3] Owen, Wehrmacht Autumns, 94.
[4] Ibid., 47.
[5] Ibid., 40.
[6] Mellott.
[7] Owen, Wehrmacht Autumns, 59.
[8] Ibid., 24.
[9] Krammer, 263.
[10] Ibid., 267.

Bibliography
  1. “10 German PW’s at Work Here.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 24, 1945.
  2. “200 Prisoners of War Available in Rockingham after July 16th.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 6, 1945.
  3. Austin, Luanne. “On the Homefront.” Daily News-Record, Mar. 15, 2007.
  4. “Every Source is Being Tapped to Get Farm Labor.” Daily News-Record, May 11, 1944.
  5. Gansberg, Judith M. Stalag, U.S.A.: The Remarkable Story of German POWs in America. New York: Crowell, 1977.
  6. ICRC. Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, Jul. 27, 1929. https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp?documentId=0BDEDDD046FDEBA9C12563CD002D69B1&action=openDocument
  7. Jost, Scott. Shenandoah Valley Apples. Chicago: Columbia College Chicago Press, 2013.
  8. Krammer, Arnold. Nazi Prisoners of War in America. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.
  9. Mellott, Jeff. “'Migrant' Workers – Exhibit Recalls When POWs Rescued Farmers.” Daily News-Record, Sep. 22, 2010.
  10. Moore, John Hammond. “Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Virginia, 1943-1946.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85(3), Jul. 1977.
  11. “Nazi Prisoners Come to County.” Daily News-Record, Jun. 16, 1945.
  12. Owen, Gregory L. “Prisoners of War in Rockingham County During WWII.” The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society Newsletter 29(2). Spring 2007.
  13. Owen, Gregory L. Wehrmacht Autumns: German Prisoners of War in the Plains District of Rockingham County, Virginia During World War II. Timberville, Va.: Gregory L. Owen, 2003
  14. Patterson, Dana L. “Church Altar a Reminder of German POWs in Area.” North Fork Journal. Sep. 16-22, 1992.
  15. “Timberville’s Peach Harvest in Full Swing.” Daily News-Record, Aug. 23, 1944.
  16. “War Prisoner Camp Meeting.” Daily News-Record, Jun. 1, 1944.
  17. “War Prisoners Arrive Today.” Daily News-Record, Aug. 1, 1944.
  18. “War Prisoners to Leave Today.” Daily News-Record, Nov. 1, 1944.
  19. “War Prisoners to Work Here.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 20, 1945.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Monroeville, Alabama - Yesterday and Today


Courtesy Library of Congress.
There has been a lot of talk in the media about Harper Lee’s new/old book, Go Set a Watchman, since long before its publication on July 14. Is it unpolished? Is Atticus a racist? Was Lee in a fit state to authorize publication? Does it diminish To Kill a Mockingbird? (To see the MRL community’s thoughts on the novel, see our Goodreads review.) Instead of revisiting all of these ideas, I want to visit the town halfway between Mobile and Montgomery that served as the inspiration for Maycomb, the setting of both novels—little Monroeville, which was named the literary capital of Alabama in 1996. For another “visit” to Maycomb, please join us at the Main branch on Saturday, September 5 at 1:00 for a showing of the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

The 1930s
While Maycomb could be any small rural town in the South (which is probably why it resonates with so many readers 55 years later), you can find its landmarks in Monroeville if you know where to look. Mark Childress, the author of Crazy in Alabama and a Monroeville native, says that Mockingbird was the first “grown-up book” he ever read. “Books had always been magical objects to me, but distant from my own experience. Authors were invisible wizards who swept me off to far places to work their spell on me. To Kill a Mockingbird was fiction, but it was real. It came from this place where I sat. It was a written by a lady my parents actually knew, a lady who had signed her name in this book I held in my hands. It told a story about a childhood lived on this very street, in these houses, in that schoolyard back yonder.”[1] Monroeville residents have always believed that Mockingbird is based on Lee’s experience. An older friend of the Childress family often pointed out Boo Radley’s home and the tree where he left trinkets for Scout and Jem as if he were a real man. In fact, when Lee was a child, a young man named Son Bowler broke some windows in the school, and his father made a deal with the authorities that he would keep his son out of trouble if they wouldn’t press charges. Son Bowler became a prisoner in his father’s house, eventually dying in his 30s of tuberculosis.

The old Monroe Country Courthouse.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Like Scout, Jem, and Dill, the children of Monroeville played on the red clay streets in the 1930s. One old-timer once recounted a story of Truman Capote (Lee’s inspiration for Dill) gathering up the boys playing ball on an abandoned lot and taking them to the drug store for milk shakes and sodas. He had the outing charged to his mother, who had left him with relatives while she was living in New Orleans. Capote apparently had quite a reputation for sass, though one would hope that young Lee, daughter of respected lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee (inspiration for Atticus Finch), was better behaved. When they weren’t playing in the streets or hanging out at the soda fountain, the children of Lee’s generation had one other great pastime: reading. I couldn’t write this better than Lee, who wrote a rare letter on the subject to Oprah in 2006:
“My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic; and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime…Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often – movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock.”[2]
Personally, I love this image.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Community Gatherings



Community Gatherings

Old English gadrian, gædrian "unite, agree, assemble; gather, collect, store up" (transitive and intransitive), used of flowers, thoughts, persons; from Proto-Germanic *gaduron "come or bring together, unite" (cognates: Old English gæd "fellowship, companionship," gædeling "companion;" Middle Low German gadderen; Old Frisian gaderia; Dutch gaderen "to gather," gade "spouse;" German Gatte "husband;" Gothic gadiliggs), from PIE *ghedh- "to unite, join" (see good (adj.)). Change of spelling from -d- to -th- is 1500s, reflecting earlier change in pronunciation (as in mother, weather, father). Related: Gathered; gathering.[1]

 Indigenous people gather in circles to share stories and spirituality.  Several tribes come together to share resources and socialize and to hold competitive games.  Such simple gatherings evolved to organized activities for economic, political, and social purposes.  Who knew that when two unrelated individuals first decided to formalize a relationship for economic and/or social purposes the meeting would eventually expand into gatherings - like the Olympics or a fair - in which the world could participate?  History tells us the ancient Roman calendar was loaded with at least weekly public sponsored feriae (holidays) to honor different gods.  Meetings at east-west trading junctures in the eastern Mediterranean lead to the creation of permanent agoras and souks for the trading of goods and for exchanging ideas and events.
Art by Dan Escott
The adoption of Christianity throughout Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, resulted in the adaptation of Roman collective activities to the purposes of the Christian church.  Religious institutions were well aware of the value of honoring saints and ritualizing practices suitable to their constituents in rural communities.  Sundays became the day people came to pray and trade   Gatherings that were located at crossroads often helped to establish and grow towns that attracted traveling peddlers and entertainers.  As both the exchange and the town grew, the markets became more organized and regulated, of course, by guilds and by governments.
agriculture and domestic goods.
In the medieval period, fairs were popular.  These were held less often than markets, were larger, and lasted several days.  In large communities, local governments or religious organizations organized these events.  The merchandise at the fair was more varied and often more valuable than in simple market places.  Visitors and entertainers came from greater distances. Contests, both scientific and physical, were featured and later, as representative governance became a reality, political stump speeches became a feature at markets.
These gatherings, small and large, were incorporated into the culture of the new world.   The first North American fair was held in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1765.   It is still operating 250 years later.  Reflecting the rural nature of early America, the first U.S. agricultural fairs were in New England but they spread rapidly throughout the States.  Elkanah Watson, a New England farmer, earned the title, "Father of US agricultural fairs" by organizing the Berkshire Agricultural Society and “creating an event (known then as a Cattle Show) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in September 1811. It was more than just an exhibit of animals – it was a competition, with prize money ($70) paid for the best exhibits of oxen, cattle, swine and sheep.”[2]
 Though these fairs evolved into large county and State sponsored events, local small town community group gatherings flourished in America under the sponsorship of church, civic, and school organizations.  These groups gathered the community through the sponsorship of ice cream socials, holiday bazaars, rummage sales, health screenings, and so forth.  One civic organization especially focuses on the small communities.  The first Ruritan club was chartered in 1928 in    The Ruritans (meaning rural and small town life) is a volunteer organization that often works with youth - FFA, 4-H, and Boy and Girl Scouts – and is active in Rockingham County.[3] 
Holland, Virginia.
Our local area has always had competitive, innovative, and proud agriculture and animal husbandry traditions.  The many small villages in Rockingham County that once held events to bring the community together have now turned these gatherings into once a year community celebrations and encourage outsiders to come into their midst.  Also, now once a year, we celebrate “Court Days” a relic from the early 1800s that provided a once-a-month place around the Courthouse for people to sell horses and agricultural products, settle legal affairs, and indulge in hard drink with companions.  Today, Court Square is a place to gather the community for the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve celebrations.  The agricultural aspect of Court Days evolved in 1892 into the first agricultural fair at Assembly Park north of Harrisonburg.  After several incorporations and relocations, it moved in 1980 to its present location on Route 11 south of Harrisonburg.[4]  The Rockingham County Fair is one of approximately 3,200 agricultural fairs in the U.S and is the largest Virginia agriculture county fair.  In 2015, the Fair is August 17 to 22.
 by Diane Rafuse and C. Metz


[1] Barnhart, Robert K., ed., Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, H.W. Wilson Co., 1988.
[2] The International Association of Fairs and Expositions.  www.fairsandexpos.com
[3] www.ruritan.org
[4] http://www.rockinghamcountyfair.com