Thousands flocked to downtown Riverhead for the 39th Annual Riverhead Country Fair yesterday.
The fair offered visitors more than 450 vendors selling everything under the sun, plus live music and entertainment, art displays and competitions featuring baked goods, produce and tractors, and carnival rides. There was a large business expo on Main Street.
The fairgrounds cover more than 100,000 square feet, according to organizers.
It’s hard to say for sure how many people attended the fair, but the weather was inviting and there was a steady crowd all day long, said Mary Ellen Ellwood, who serves as co-coordinator of the fair with Patrick Mulcahy. Vendors put the crowd estimate at about 30,000, Ellwood said this morning.
The fair’s layout was changed up this year, due to the creation of a screened area of trash receptacles for Main Street businesses. The showmobile was set up on the west side of the riverfront parking lot rather than the east side, and the amusement rides were set up on an area of publicly owned land on the Riverside traffic circle, at the Peconic Avenue entry point to the fair.
It was a great spot for the rides, Ellwood said.
“We were getting calls all week asking if the rides would be open on Saturday, which is something they used to do in years past,” Ellwood said. “Maybe we’ll do that again next year.”
The fair has taken place on the Sunday of Columbus Day weekend each year since 1976, when the founders of Riverhead Townscape, a civic beautification group, decided to reinstitute an annual fair in town. Riverhead had hosted the Suffolk County fair from the 1840s until some time during the Great Depression. That fair, hosted by the Riverhead Agricultural Society, had been held on property that came to be known as the fair grounds, just north of Pulaski Street. A good portion of that site is now owned by the Riverhead Central School District, which acquired the property during the Depression and built the Pulaski Street School— which was then a new high school— as a project of the federal Work Projects Administration. After the Depression, the fair was held “only erratically” until 1976, former Riverhead councilman and longtime fair co-ordinator Jim Lull told RiverheadLOCAL in 2010.
Townscape uses the funds raised by the fair to purchase and plant trees and flowers and other landscaping around Riverhead.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Peter Blasl
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