On September 18, 1949, a twenty-nine-year-old from Lockport named Jack White drove a Lincoln around a half-mile dirt oval in Hamburg and won a NASCAR race. It was the fifth event ever run in the series NASCAR then called Strictly Stock, the one that eventually became the Cup, and one of only eight held that first season. The track was the Erie County Fairgrounds.
That's the part people miss about this place. Twelve days in August get all the attention. The rest of the calendar is where the strange history lives.
Older than the county it's named for
The organization behind the fair, today the Erie County Agricultural Society, was founded in 1819 as the Niagara County Horticultural Society. Erie County didn't exist yet. It was carved out of Niagara in 1821. The society ran its first fair in 1820 on the Buffalo waterfront near Terrace and Main, ground now buried under downtown.
Then it stalled out. Roads in the 1820s and '30s were bad enough that hauling a prize bull twenty miles to be judged was a genuine expedition, and the fair went dormant for roughly two decades. It restarted in 1841 at Lafayette Square and spent the next twenty-odd years as a traveling show, setting up in Aurora, Lancaster, and whichever town made the best pitch that year.
The vote was 18 to 17
On January 9, 1868, at the society's annual meeting in Springville, a Hamburg man named Luther Titus stood up and made an offer on behalf of the Hamburg Driving Park Association: take our new half-mile track and grounds. The membership voted 18 to 17 in favor.
One vote. The fair has been in Hamburg every year since.
It began on twelve acres. The society bought land of its own in 1881, from Maria and Naomi Clark and from George M. Pierce, the same George M. Pierce who had been elected the Village of Hamburg's first president seven years before, down on Main Street. The grounds now run to 275 acres. The oldest building still standing on them is the Octagon, put up in 1885.
How big is it, exactly
Depends who's counting and when. Buffalo's WIVB has reported it as the third-largest county fair in the United States; another tally, working from 2018 figures, puts it fourth-largest in North America and second in New York State. Rankings like that move around, so take any single number as a snapshot.
The attendance record doesn't move. The society counted 1,238,456 people through the gates in 2019. The City of Buffalo has fewer than 300,000 residents. Whatever else the fair is, it is the largest gathering of human beings that happens in Western New York, and it happens in a village of about ten thousand.
Two misses since 1841
In 1943 the fair was cancelled outright: gasoline, rubber, and nearly everything else was rationed, and a ten-day livestock exhibition was not a wartime priority. In 2020 it was cancelled for the pandemic, though the society treated it as a postponement rather than a skip: the 181st edition simply happened in 2021.
It nearly lost a third year. Around 12:30 p.m. on July 20, 2017, an EF2 tornado came onshore off Lake Erie with winds near 115 mph and cut a 6.2-mile path from Hamburg into Orchard Park, directly across the fairgrounds. The National Weather Service documented hundreds of blown-out car windows, downed trees, and structural damage that included the grandstand. Nobody was hurt. The fair opened on schedule three weeks later.
The other eleven months
Harness racing got there first. James J. Dunnigan opened Buffalo Raceway on the grounds in June 1942, immediately after New York approved pari-mutuel betting on harness racing, and the track is still running its meet. In March 2004 more than 900 video lottery terminals went in as Fairgrounds Gaming; the operation moved into a new building in 2010 and became Hamburg Gaming.
The Speedway is the one that's gone. From 1946 to 1997 the half-mile oval ran sprint cars and dirt modifieds, and twice it ran NASCAR: Jack White in 1949, and Dick Linder the following year. The series never came back. White started twelve races across three seasons and never won another one, which means the only victory of his career happened forty minutes from his own front door.
A word about the burger
You will hear that the hamburger was invented at the 1885 Erie County Fair, when the Menches brothers of Ohio ran out of sausage and ground up beef instead. Treat that as legend, because that's what it is. There are four or five competing origin stories and no decisive document behind any of them. It is, however, the only version that explains the name, and the author Christopher Carosa, who spent decades on the question, has argued the Hamburg account is the strongest of the lot. Believe what you want. The fair sells a lot of burgers either way.
Wear it
Two hundred years of one organization doing one thing in one place, interrupted twice. That's the design on the Erie County Fairgrounds tee: not a midway ride or a fried thing on a stick, but the grounds themselves, the ones that took a tornado in July and opened in August anyway.
It's part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt. Hamburg has two more in it: Main Street and Eighteen Mile Creek. If you want to see where the rest of the region lands, there's the full town-by-town guide.
Erie County Fairgrounds, 5600 McKinley Parkway, Hamburg, New York.