FRYEBURG – The Herrschafts of Guilford, Conn., have journeyed to the Fryeburg Fair for 32 years.
What have they seen change in all that time? “There are a lot more of these things,” Charles Herrschaft said Wednesday as he nodded out the window to the RVs parked near his own smallish camper that he bought in 1989.
Another camper, Sharon Mayo, who’s been coming to the fair from Florida with her husband for 15 years, said, “We started out in a little camper that we borrowed, and then we got a small one. And they just keep getting bigger and this is our biggest yet.”
As she spoke, her husband pressed a button to open the extra-wide portion of their RV.
In the days leading up to the Fryeburg Fair, campers from across the country and parts of Canada have been pulling up early to claim one of the 3,000 camper lots and settle in for the upcoming week of festivities.
Helen Pepin of West Paris, who helps run the fair campsites, said, “This place gets so full, it’s hard to get campers in and out … They like to get here early so they don’t run over someone.”
Pepin said that many campers who come back every year call and reserve the same site.
And while the plots look uniform across the expanse of grass, people can get attached to their lots and to their neighbors.
Pepin said a portion of the campground is set aside for those who run concessions and, like the people there for pleasure, they come from many different places.
“They go all over with different fairs. And affairs,” she said, stressing the last word and smiling slightly.
John Curran and his wife, Debbi, run “John and Debbi’s,” a family sausage and hot dog stand. “We’ve been here since 1974,” Curran said. When they are not traveling to fairs, the Currans live in Florida.
Mayo said the fair pulls her and her husband back every year because it offers a little bit of everything, including stories. “You hear stories, old-time stories of how the fair used to be,” she said.
The Herrschafts make the fair a part of a seasonal harvest journey, in a sense. After they leave Fryeburg, they head to Pennsylvania and a certain potato chip factory there that sells small bags of chips by the caseload.
And then they give them away to children at Halloween. “It’s gotten so the kids ask for them now,” Herrschaft said.
And so the tradition goes.
Comments are no longer available on this story