FRYEBURG – The Fryeburg Fair ended Sunday with some light rain showers and more than a few muddy spots along the pathways. Neither rain nor cold was enough to dampen the spirits of fair-goers, though. In boots and raincoats, they lined up for pizza, rode the midway, and pored over vendors’ wares.
At least one fair participant was ready to call it a week and go home, though. Sequin, the 7- month old dairy cow, had had enough. “She wants to go home,” owner Jesica Stinson said. “By the end of the week, they’re always ready to go.”
Stinson and her family spent the week at the fair with many of the cows from the family farm, Small’s Dairy Farm, in Bowdoin. Stinson showed five cows in the 4-H Club dairy show, winning three second-place and two first-place ribbons. One of those blue ribbons belongs to little Sequin.
Stinson and older sister Amanda, 19, are the seventh generation living on the family farm. Amanda Stinson plans to stay on at the farm and continue the family tradition. She is studying dairy production and management at SUNY-Cobleskill in New York. There, she is learning the latest trends in milking and ways to improve the farm. Her time is evenly divided between classroom instruction and lab work in the university’s barns.
It seemed natural to Ramona Stinson that her daughter Amanda would be the one to carry on the family’s work. “I call her my clone,” she said. “Jesie’s more into sheep and goats and all the other oddities.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without them,” Amanda Stinson said of the family’s cows.
Life at the Fryeburg Fair is far from fun and games for a farm girl. Nineteen-year-old Cassie Lane, of New Vineyard, said that she was up at 3:30 Sunday morning. At a time when most young women her age would have been sound asleep after a late night at the fair, or maybe just going to bed, Lane was milking cows.
Lane’s family owns Shady Lane Farm, home to forty dairy cows, sixty other cows, and pigs as well. After an early morning milking, she washed each of the 20 cows her family had brought to the fair and changed their bedding. Later, when the midway was in full swing and other fair-goers were beginning to look for french fries or doughboys, Lane led a half-dozen cows through mud dotted with cow patties to the show ring.
For her troubles, Lane was awarded six champion awards, including a senior champ and grand champ award for Niki, a milking short horn. Sunday was Lane’s last show with 4-H. She’s currently studying early childhood education at the University of Maine in Calais. If she visits the fair next year, it’ll be as a college student, and probably not before sunrise.
Comments are no longer available on this story