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Cloudless blue skies and unseasonably warm temperatures helped inspire thousands to visit downtown Riverhead Sunday for the 36th Annual Riverhead Country Fair.
Main Street and the entire length of the Peconic River parking lot were transformed for the annual street festival featuring nearly 500 vendors, live entertainment, carnival rides and a midway — along with the more traditional stuff of an old-fashioned county fair, the farm and homemaking competitions and pumpkin carving contests. See video.
The Country Fair has been hosted downtown since 1976, a project of Riverhead Townscape, a community beautification organization formed to help celebrate the American bicentennial.
Townscape founders decided to reinstitute an annual fair in Riverhead, which, as the county seat, had hosted the Suffolk County Fair from the 1840s until some time during the Great Depression. The 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, where the Pulaski Street school and athletic fields are today. After the Depression — during which the school was built at the fair grounds site — 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-chairpersons of the Country Fair committee in 1983, and served in that capacity until this year. Their son, James and Wading River resident Patrick Mulcahy took over as co-chairmen this year.
Photo credits: Top photo by Phil Gatz.
RiverheadLOCAL photo slideshow by Katie Blasl.
