Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to head to West Allis this week for the Wisconsin State Fair. But at the edge of the fairgrounds in an unassuming office building, there’s a space that celebrates the fair year-round.
The Wisconsin State Fair archives store a myriad of artifacts from the fair’s one-hundred and seventy-five years of history. It has everything from ribbons and old ads, to pieces of the first Milwaukee Mile. But while the artifacts themselves are old, the archive is relatively new.
As archivist Tom Zimmerman explains, "Around 1996, the Wisconsin State Fair recognized there was a need to collect, catalog, and archive all this information they were mapping, and there was a gentleman, Jerry Zimmerman, who was retired. He was my dad. There were no two rooms of archives back then, some of it was underneath the grandstand. Some of it was in paper boxes, and a lot of it was memories and photographs."
It was a monumental task, but one that Tom says his father relished. Jerry was an avid fair-goer, who had started collecting items from the State Fair long before the project began.
"He had his own collection because he had grown up 3 blocks up on Schlinger Avenue, only missed 2 fairs in his lifetime, and so he was the wealth of that history, which is one reason the Wisconsin State Fair asked him to volunteer," says Zimmerman. "But then he reached out to other people who loved the fair just as much. Do you have any postcards? Do you have any medals, ribbons? And he started bringing them in."
Today, these items fill up the two rooms that comprise the Wisconsin State Fair archive. Zimmerman and fellow archivist Jon Van Beckum, have been exploring the archives and documenting what’s in it.
"Many of our ribbons are from livestock, from the very earliest part of the fairs, people would come and exhibit and show off their livestock," says Van Beckum. "They’ll show off their produce or the products that they baked, and we would have premium books. One of them right here is from 1888, that we sent out every year, and in there, you would have lists, or or classes of categories that they'd be judging, and sometimes people could win, prize money for it and also a ribbon. And that's still something that we do today."
While some things haven’t changed over the nearly 2 centuries of the fair’s history, there is a big difference from the earliest days of the fair: the location. The first Wisconsin State Fair in 1851 was held in Janesville, and would shift locations. But that quickly changed.
"A lot of people came from Milwaukee. They didn't want to have to keep moving the fare around, and at that time, the Wisconsin legislature said, we'll donate $150,000, [that] came with strings attached, 10 miles within the Milwaukee radius for the people to get there and at least 100 acres," says Zimmerman. "So it's still where it was in 1891, lined by Greenfield Avenue and 84th Street. And since then there's just been that progression of construction and love that went into the state fair."
The footprint of the State Fair grounds has remained relatively the same over the last century. Most of the early structures are gone, but there remain a few examples of those early buildings.
Van Beckum explains, "There are still 3 buildings that were here from the early 1900s. You have the Dairy Building, you have the Grand Champion Hall, and the red brick cattle barn. Those are the three surviving buildings from that time. But the fair has constantly changed over time."
Those changes include the grounds themselves. The State Fair grounds used to include a grove of trees, and did you know there used to be a creek that flowed through the Wisconsin State Fair? And it’s still there, just under the surface.
"Back in the 60s, when there was a grove of trees there near Greenfield Avenue, my grandfather would bring me over there. We'd walk the grove, throw sticks off one end of the bridge, see him go under the bridge and come out the other side. So it was a park-like atmosphere throughout and a very beautiful space, and Honey Creek now goes under the Expo Center," says Zimmerman.
The creek was one factor in last year's flooding of the fairground.
For today’s fair goers who are interested in learning more about its history, this year’s fair is featuring pieces of the archives on display in Grand Champion Hall. Artifacts from year’s past sit alongside winning entries from this year’s fair, which could end up in the archives themselves.
And if you happen by the history display in Exploratory Park, you might see Zimmermann and Van Beckum. They’re always looking for new additions to the archives, to ensure that every Wisconsin State Fair is celebrated and remembered.
"If people come here and they say, hey, I have Wisconsin State Fair artifacts home I want to donate, please, we, we are more than happy to take new things. I just had an individual email me an advertisement from a 1929 Milwaukee Sentinel, and he wanted us to have it. So I very gratefully took that as a very nice thank you note back, and we're always looking to add to our 175 years so we keep on growing and be for another 175 years," says Zimmerman.
The Wisconsin State Fair runs until August 16th.
