New Ipswich Children's Fair
Written by the Last Survivor of its Founders at the Age of Ninety-one Years
Records and Reminiscences of Children’s Fair
“Seeking to make idle hours useful hours, I have written it in my old age Please accept my old RECORDS AND REMINISCENCES.” - C. H. Obear - July 8, 1911
The Birth of the Fair - Page 7-8
This was the situation of our people, when on October 12th, 1862, the first Children's Fair was held.
At the sound of the first gun poured into Sumpter, pro claiming the breaking of the compact between the states of the North and the states of the South, the men and boys of our town had rallied and gone to the defense of the Union.
The town had made liberal provision for their equipment and for the support of their families in their absence. The women, and even the children, had banded themselves together to send supplies of comfort and encouragement to the husbands, and sons, and brothers, and lovers fighting under the stripes and stars their ancestors had loved and defended.
Only one of our three churches was open for public worship. All articles of consumption were dear and growing increasingly so; and no immediate prospect of a better state of things.
Would it have been supposed that this would have been a favorable time to seek to enlist a larger, broader sympathy in the welfare of a needy world outside of us, and some effort to better the condition of God's children needing the help we could give?
Yet it was in these circumstances that our Children's Fair was started, that has known no decadence for half a century! The effects and results arising from these annually recurring Harvest Festivals call to mind some lines of one of our early New Ipswich poets, written for a boy's speech at the Academy early in the last century:
"Tall oaks from little acorns grow, Large streams from little fountains flow."
-By the way, this speech was copied widely and I remember its insertion in the "Columbian Orator," a work in vogue in my childhood, and its having been attributed to the Hon. Edward Everett, of wide fame. Its author was David. Everett, the husband of Dolly Appleton Everett, who gave to the Congregational Church its Parsonage.
Is it strange that the same truth of unexpected results following small causes brings to one's memory also the parody of the wag
"Great aches from little toe-corns grow,"
149th Children’s Fair - August 21, 2010
James Roger diary entry
14th July 1913 - Henry on a “spree”
Warm, windy, and cloudy; wind south west. David and Henry haying and _________. I hoed some in the garden and picked two fowls: one for Lowes and one for ourselves. Henry Royce's wife away from home, and H. has gone on the spree.
Upcoming Event
163rd Children’s Fair - August 17, 2024
New Ipswich Congregational Church
150 Main Street, New Ipswich, NH
10 AM - 3 PM
I wonder what kind of spree Henry went on. He was of modest means, a stone mason, and road agent at the same time Adolph Rochon (the man my grandmother lived with) was and also Ed Wheeler who lived in Ollie's present house. There is a story about Henry using dynamite to open a ditch alongside one of the roads, but in one case the dynamite did not go off and when he and his 2 helpers lifted the planks covering the dynamite it then exploded seriously injuring his helpers but just giving him a scratch on the face.
Did the Fair's proceeds, or fruits of the harvest, get sent to Union soldiers?