It’s Sunday of Columbus Day weekend and in Riverhead that’s meant one thing: It’s Country Fair day.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the popular event, one of the state’s largest festivals and fairs.
Riverhead’s Main Street and the Peconic River parking lot will be chock full of vendors’ booths selling everything under the sun.
And there will be sun — plenty of it. The weather forecast is calling for clear skies and sunshine all day today with high temperature in the mid-60s. Not too hot, not too cold and no rain — perfect weather for the fair.
The fair opens at 10 a.m. and runs through 5 p.m.
Entries in agriculture, homemaking and needlecraft competitions as well as the annual vegetable decorating contest will be on display on the grounds of East End Arts.
The fair also features carnival rides and a midway in addition to its 400-plus vendors.
For cars with handicap stickers: The parking lot off East Avenue north of the Methodist Church is reserved for handicapped parking. Also reserved is the eastern most section of the Chase bank parking lot on West Main Street. For people in need of van access, the south side of Main Street west of Griffing Avenue has been set aside.
Riverhead Townscape was established during the American bicentennial year to beautify downtown Riverhead. The founders of Townscape decided to reinstitute an annual fair in Riverhead, which had hosted the Suffolk County fair from the 1840s until some time during the Great Depression, according to the late longtime coordinator of the fair, Jim Lull.
The county 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 it is now owned by the Riverhead Central School District, which acquired title during the Depression and built the Pulaski Street School, then a new high school, as a project of the WPA, Lull told RiverheadLOCAL in a 2010 interview.
After the Depression, the fair was held “only erratically,” Lull said, until a group of residents in 1976 decided to resurrect it.
Lull and his wife Connie became co-chairmen of the Country Fair committee in 1983 and continued in that role for the next 27 years.
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