Grange Fair: Centre County’s Family Reunion

This story originally appeared in the August 2024 edition of Town&Gown Magazine .

Centre Hall Mayor LeDon Young sometimes thinks about what Leonard Rhone would say about the fair he founded if he could see it today.

The farmer, legislator and visionary from Potter Township organized the first iteration of the Grange Fair back in 1874—a one-day “pic-nik” bringing 3,000 farmers together in Linden Hall to share information and socialize. The tradition continued at various Centre County locations until 1890, when Rhone directed local Granges to purchase 25 acres of land as a permanent site for the annual agricultural gathering.

Grange Park has since expanded to 264 acres, making it the largest fairground in Pennsylvania. It houses 100 buildings as well as campsites for 1,000 tents and 1,500 RVs and boasts one of the most well-regarded equine facilities on the East Coast. It hosts myriad events throughout the year. Most notably, it welcomes over 200,000 visitors to the Centre County Grange Fair and Encampment for 10 days each August.

While today’s fair might look unrecognizable in comparison to the horse-and-buggy, camp-meeting style gatherings of the 1870s, Young believes the “Father of the Grange Fair” would be pleased to see how the agricultural celebration has evolved since that first “pic-nik” 150 years ago.

“I am really distressed when everyone says, ‘What would Leonard Rhone say if he could see the fair now?’—suggesting that he would be overwhelmed or shocked. Absolutely not,” says Young, a longtime member of the fair committee and Centre Hall’s Progress Grange. “Leonard Rhone would say, ‘I expected nothing less.’ He would have expected us to have a thriving enterprise.”

In fact, Rhone’s vision and foresight set the foundation for many of the factors that have led to the growth and success of the Grange Fair over the past 150 years.

A 10-Day Town

In some ways, the Grange Fair is a typical—albeit unusually large—county fair. It has carnival games and rides (provided by Garbrick Amusements for almost 70 years); 320 concession stands; 7,000 items and farm animals on exhibit; livestock auctions; a grandstand that has hosted “up-and-comers” such as Garth Brooks , Miranda Lambert and Kenny Chesney; and two smaller stages for local performers and educational demonstrations.

But one aspect of the Grange Fair distinguishes it from all the others: it is the last remaining U.S. fair with a tent encampment.

On the eve of the fair, 1,000 families move into neat rows of 14’-by-14’ canvas tents, bringing with them everything but the kitchen sink—cots, sofas, tables, microwaves, refrigerators, rugs, decorative lighting and enough clothing and food to last for the duration of the fair.

Add in the 1,500 families who also camp in RVs on the grounds, and Young says, “I go from being the mayor of little ol’ Centre Hall to being the mayor of the third-largest city in Centre County during the fair.”

The coveted tent sites are passed down from generation to generation, and it is almost impossible to obtain one any other way. They have famously been at the center of divorce battles, and the waiting list for tents was cut off years ago, when it reached 500 people.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tenting tradition can be traced to Leonard Rhone.

Back in the early days of the “pic-nik,” there were no hotels nearby, and, as Young says, “Horses don’t have headlights.” People could not safely come for a day and then travel back home in the dark. So, Rhone borrowed 50 tents from the Pennsylvania National Guard, and a tradition was born. Today, the tents are manufactured in Canada and are supplied and erected by the fair.

Agnes Homan’s grandfather, George Hoy, was one of the first tent campers at Grange Fair when the park opened in 1891. The same tent site has remained in Homan’s family ever since.

Homan, who celebrated her 100th birthday in December of last year, has not missed a Grange Fair in her entire life. She lives within walking distance, on the family’s Old Fort farm in the same farmhouse in which she was born. There have been very few fairs in which she has not slept in the tent: her first two years of life; at the birth of her daughter, Marjorie; the summer she was caring for her dying mother; and during the past couple of years as she has been recovering from a stroke.

Grange Fair has always been scheduled toward the end of growing season, at a time when farmers could afford to take a small break from the fields, and for most it was as close as it got to a summer vacation.

“Nobody ever went on vacation when I was a kid. They always had to be here because of the milking,” Homan says.

She has clear memories of setting up camp at the fair as a child.

“We didn’t have a truck, so my dad had to hitch up horses and a wagon to move our furniture to the fair to move into the tent,” she says.

Homan is a longtime member of Progress Grange. Her father-in-law, Ralph Homan, was a member of the Fair Committee for many years; now her son of the same name serves on that same committee. She says the elder Ralph Homan came up with the idea to offer free admission to kids on Mondays—a staple of the fair that continues today.

“He said if they lowered the rates the kids would come, because there wasn’t very much to do at the fair on Mondays,” she says. “That’s when I went home to do laundry.”

Homan fondly recalls spending time on the playground as a child and says her children did the same. To this day, Grange Park is the only fairground in Pennsylvania with a playground—something Young feels is a necessity for the families who “live” on the grounds for ten days.

“When we first asked the [PA] Department of Agriculture for money for our playground, Secretary [of Agriculture Samuel] Hayes said, ‘You have to understand, they become a town,’” Young recalls.

Homan’s favorite part of the fair is “seeing friends from year to year. Because some people I didn’t see from one year to the next, even though they lived around here, because we didn’t get to visit that often, but they would come to the tent.”

One year, Homan recalls counting the visitors to the family’s tent. “There’s a pole in the tent, and we said if people came in and held onto the pole, we would write their names down. People that just went by and waved, we didn’t write their names down. I think we had 179 visitors.”

At one time there were many encampment fairs, but when cars with headlights came along, allowing people to come and go in one day, tenting fairs faded out of favor. So why has the encampment component of Grange Fair not only survived, but thrived?

“We have remained dedicated to it, and the structure was already here—thank you, Master Rhone,” Young says. She believes that the fact that the tents are already set up and provided at a relatively low cost ($10 to $20 per day) has made it desirable for families to continue the tradition.

Embracing Technology

One of the things Homan’s family would bring to the fair on their horse-drawn wagon was an ice box.

“The ice man came right by our tent; I think they came every other day. We bought a chunk of ice and put it in the ice box. That was before we had electricity for a refrigerator,” she says.

However, even before she was born, Homan’s family would have had at least enough electricity at their tent to fire up a lightbulb, thanks to Rhone.

“Electricity had come to Centre Hall in December of 1915. Leonard Rhone went to Pomona (the organization overseeing Centre County granges) in 1916 and asked them to float a bond for $5 so they could do wiring to have electricity. So the grounds were wired. If you wanted a light in your tent you could go to headquarters and pay $1, and then you could screw the lightbulb in,” explains Young. “Many people said their first encounter with electricity was at the fair.”

Young says embracing technology is a core tenet of the Grange, so it is not surprising that the fair has often been responsible for introducing new innovations to the public.

When Grange Park opened in 1891, the headquarters building (which still exists today) had its own telephone.

Years later, when Young was a child, she recalls, “Bell Telephone had a huge tent, and I remember going in and there were a herd of us around a demonstration of a new technology: a phone with push buttons instead of a dial. They had a timer to show you how much quicker the buttons were than the dial. So we’d all line up and compete. We had a ball.”

Young also recalls a time when a bank of payphones sat in front of the headquarters building. Of course, they’ve since been removed, as cell phone service has taken over.

The Grange Fair has also used amusements to introduce new technology to the public. Back in the 1880s, Rhone liked to include balloon ascensions at his gatherings, and Young says it was a big deal for people to get a chance to fly well before the airplane was invented. After its invention, a biplane offered short flights at the fair, where Homan recalls taking her very first airplane ride as a young girl.

The first carnival ride at the fair, The Wave, appeared in 1915. It was a track that took passengers around in a circle and over a bump.

“For many people, it was the first time that they moved without a horse or locomotive,” Young says. “Again—always embracing technology.”

Celebrating 150 Years

World events occasionally affected the fair. In 1917, children under the age of 18 were forbidden from attending due to an outbreak of polio. Twice in its 150-year history the fair was cancelled altogether—once in 1943 due to gasoline rationing during World War II, and again in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was difficult recovering from the loss of the fair in 2020, Young says, as the infrastructure of Grange Park is costly to maintain.

“We still had real estate taxes, 100 buildings to insure and maintain, employees to pay,” she says. They survived by utilizing the government programs that were available at the time.

Today, Grange Fair is indeed the thriving enterprise that Young imagines would please Leonard Rhone. The park hosts events almost every month of the year, including the Remington Ryde Bluegrass Festival, the People’s Choice Festival, horse shows, rodeos, gun shows and more, as well as tailgate parking for RVs of all sizes during Penn State football season.

Together with the annual fair, the whole enterprise infuses $16-20 million into the local economy each year.

This year, Grange Fair takes place from Aug. 16 through Aug. 24. Move-in day for campers is Aug. 15. To celebrate the 150th anniversary, a presentation of historic fair photos will be shown at the grandstand on Sunday morning, followed that evening by the showing of a new documentary about the fair, produced with help from the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau. Cupcakes will be provided for everyone.

Perhaps the most fitting way to pay tribute to this Centre County institution that has become so ingrained in local culture is to simply stop by and visit. Homan will be there, and she expects her six grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and even her three great-great-grandchildren from Tennessee to be there as well.

As Young says, “I call it the family reunion for Centre County.” T&G

Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.

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