History:

The Great Geauga County Fair is Ohio's oldest continuous county fair and one of the oldest existing agricultural fairs in the nation.

In 1823, James Monroe, our 5th President, was proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, the United States was still a young nation, the State of Ohio was only twenty years old, much of Ohio's Western Reserve was yet a rugged wilderness and the invention of modern conveniences, like the telephone, television, automobile and Internet, were decades away.

Yet, in Geauga County in February 1823, a hardy group of pioneers, some of whom were among the first settlers to Ohio's Western Reserve region at the turn of the century, had the vision to band together to form one of the state's earliest agricultural societies— The Geauga County Agricultural and Manufacturing Society. The Society, one of the nation's oldest such organizations still in existence, was designed to "promote Agriculture & Domestic Manufactures.

Members of the Society then set out to formally organize the annual county-wide fair that would showcase the development of agricultural products, plus the newest farm labor-saving devices, and also would celebrate and preserve the nation's economic independence, bountiful harvests, common New England heritage and ideals. In the spirit of hard work, perseverance, fellowship, American Yankee ingenuity and good old- fashioned fun they prevailed and thereby began a tradition that endures to the present.se.