The Montezuma County Fair was born from the apple harvest. According to a 2021 History Colorado-funded study by the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, fruit growers organized the first fairs in 1902, timed to the fall crop, sharing knowledge and comparing varieties the way farmers had at county fairs since the practice began in Massachusetts in 1804. The tradition ran for 16 years, until influenza swept through the county right on the heels of the October 1918 fair and shut the gatherings down. They didn’t return until 1945, when organizers announced the “First Annual Montezuma County Fair” – seemingly having forgotten the fairs held decades before. Fruit has anchored it ever since, though with less variety than in those early years.
The fair’s purpose has shifted little along the way. A 1928 Cortez Journal-Herald premium list (https://bit.ly/3RFnlLl) – from one of those years the fair found its way back before the county made it official again in 1945 – offered prizes for the “best original poem on Montezuma theme,” the best rural school display and the best account of “the Legend of Montezuma Valley.” Today’s children learn beef brands and build rag bunnies at the CSU Extension’s Craftivities booth instead, and raise animals they’ll show and sell. This year’s fair opened to the public today, Wednesday, July 29, and wraps this weekend with the Junior Livestock Sale on Saturday, Aug. 1, and the 4-H dance that night.
It’s a fitting bookend to a season that also carries Archuleta County into its 75th anniversary and opens the La Plata County Fair on Wednesday, Aug. 5. Long before tourism, Southwest Colorado was built on three things: mining, the railroad and agriculture. The fairs are where that last inheritance still gets handed down in person – and where anyone who’s drifted from it can find their way back.
La Plata County’s fair carries its own deep roots, nearing eight decades in its modern form and descending from a fairgoing tradition that reaches back to the late 1800s, when Durango’s early fairs drew crowds to a racetrack and grandstand near Animas City. Archuleta’s fair, marking 75 years July 30 through Aug. 2, began in 1951 when local ranchers and the county extension agent decided the community needed a showplace for registered cattle and 4-H projects – explicitly, as one early organizer put it, for “town’s people and ranchers alike.”
Walk into any of these fairgrounds this month and the same scene repeats itself: a teenager in the show ring, one hand steady on a lead rope, explaining to a judge exactly what she fed her steer and why. That’s 4-H at work – the CSU Extension youth program that has children as young as 8 keeping record books, mastering showmanship and pledging their head, heart, hands and health to club, community and country.
Alongside them are FFA members from high schools in Cortez, Durango, Bayfield, Ignacio and Pagosa Springs, the next generation of growers learning the trade even as the ground under them gets harder to farm – drought, thin margins, the rising cost of fuel and feed. These aren’t distant statistics; they’re the children down the road, losing sleep over an animal’s weight the week before weigh-in, and often saying a teary goodbye to that same animal days later in the sale ring.
The work keeps adapting, too. Montezuma County’s heritage apple orchards now feed a growing cluster of regional cider makers, and weekly farmers markets in Cortez, Durango and Pagosa Springs keep the harvest close to home.
The fairgrounds were built by hand, in hard times, by people who believed this work deserved to be seen – not just by other ranchers, but by the whole community. Three counties, one season: Come see for yourself.
