It is Fair Week in Altenburg. In my opinion, Fred Eggers is the best person to tell the history of the East Perry Community Fair, and that is what you are getting today. Fred is in his 45th year of being the Publicity Chairman for the Fair. He has served 24 years on the Fair Board., including 3 years as President and 21 years as Treasurer. Enjoy his story, and if you see him at the Fair, make sure you thank him for all his years of service to the Fair.

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Warren Schmidt asked me if I would write a blog on the history of the East Perry Community Fair and I agreed knowing that I had a significant amount of information that I accumulated when I did a PowerPoint presentation to the students at Altenburg Public School in 2015.

Since that time, I have started to use the State Historical Society of Missouri’s (SHSMO) Digital Newspapers website to find articles from the Perry County newspapers for additional stories about what I am researching. It is a great resource, and it is free.

Just a few words on the history of fairs. Fairs date to at least 500 BC when the prophet Ezekiel wrote in Chapter 7, Verse 12 (KJV), “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs”.

Fairs were held throughout history including medieval Europe and in America from colonial to modern times.

So, when was the first fair in what we now know as East Perry County? I think that it was probably in the 1790s by the Shawnee and Delaware tribes that lived along the Apple Creek. Native Americans celebrated the ripening of their corn crop with the Green Corn Festival.

The earliest mention of fairs in Perry County that I found was in April 1870 when a committee was formed to find a location for a fairground, Two of the three members of that committee were Charles Weber, who was one of the original Saxon immigrants, and John Jacob Seibel, who was born in 1840 in the Altenburg area. In 1870 they were both living in Perryville and were very active in Perry County politics. Apparently, no site for a fairground was found because in August of that year, the editor of the Perryville Weekly Union lamented that the county did not have any fairs.

By the early 1900s there were fairs throughout Perry County. I remember my father talking about having a fair in Farrar. This would have likely been before 1915 when he moved to Indiana at the age of fifteen, because after he returned to Farrar in 1920 there were more news articles about our area. I suspect that the lack of coverage for the East Perry County area was due to German being the primary language used in our area. In those times there were also records of fairs being held in Apple Creek, Appleton, Biehle,
Brazeau, Eureka, and Oak Ridge.

It appears that following World War I there were even more fairs throughout the county. An article in 1919 lists seven fairs that were being held. The Claryville fair was called the Bois Brule Bottom Community Fair.

The first fair in Altenburg for which we have records was in 1919. Our museum has the book that contains the minutes of the meeting that organized that fair. Mr. Raut the county extension agent “made speech and explained community fair”. The fair catalog in 1919 consisted of four pages. Altenburg Community Fairs were also held in 1920 and 1921. In 1920, the Wittenberg Milling Company gave premiums of its flour for the best loaves of bread. Unfortunately, the Altenburg Community Fair ended after just
three years.

The great depression of the 1920s and 1930s seems to have reduced the number of fairs significantly. In 1929 a committee was formed to plan a fair for the next year, but there are no news articles in 1930. The stock market crash in October 1929 signaled the peak of the depression and likely was behind no fair being held. I found it interesting that fairs were held in Menfro in 1930 and 1931.

On April 22, 1937, a meeting was held to discuss plans to organize the East Perry Community Fair. The county agent, J. A. Fairchild, helped with this organization.

The 1937 fair was held on the Trinity Lutheran Church picnic grounds and has been held at that location ever since. At some point a two-story building which had concession sales on the ground level and a bandstand on upper level was used for the fairs. In 1938 the Trinity Young Peoples Society dedicated a hall a week before that year’s fair. News articles concerning the early years of the fair tell us that motion
pictures were shown at those fairs, and they were likely located in this building. This building has been used for Home Economics exhibits for many years.

With the onset of World War II, the fair was not held in the years 1942 to 1945 in compliance with government requests to conserve resources. The event returned in 1946 and has been held every year since then except for the covid pandemic in 2020. For many years the fair has been known as “The Best Little Fair in the Land”. I located an article in 1950 when it was tagged as the best little fair in Southeast Missouri and in 1951 when it was it was changed to “in the land”.

In 1955 the fair received national attention when it was featured in an article in This Day magazine.

In 1950 the fair was incorporated as the Perry County Agricultural and Mechanical Society of Altenburg, Missouri. That year a .18-acre lot was purchased with plans for a building of its own. In 1952 a Quonset style building was constructed like the millions of those “huts” that built by the American military during and after World War II. It continues to be used for the Field & Forage, Horticulture, and Photography
Departments on the upper level and 4-H exhibits in the basement.

The event has continued to grow since its small beginnings in 1937. Over the years the organization has purchased additional property including the Trinity Picnic Grove, to allow for expansion of the fair and provide for more parking. It now owns over forty acres of ground and encompasses over fifty acres including property rented from its neighbors. The fairgrounds have over twenty buildings and barns that total over 50,000 square feet. Those buildings include a 2,500 square foot pavilion that was built by the
East Perry Lions club, a 3,600 square foot building that was built by the Perryville High School FFA Alumni, four beef cattle barns that total over 14,000 square feet that were financed in large part by fair sponsors and other area businesses and cattle farmers. The last newspapers available from the SHSMO website are from 1963, but I was able to find this photo from the 1962 fair of the Home Economics building which includes some of my high school classmates.

This aerial view from Google Maps shows the large area that is included in the fairgrounds. For more information on the 2025 edition of the fair, visit the East Perry Community Fair Facebook page and watch for the insert in the Perry County Republic-Monitor which will be available on Thursday.