Reminiscences of Children's Fair (Page 27-29)
Construction of the Fair (Continued Page 27-29)
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
Pictures ( Pages 27 - 29)
A description of what would have seen the fair in 1887
It is so common to embellish even very insignificant volumes with pictures to illustrate their prominent scenes, I think that before coming to a review of the Quarter Centennial of Children's Fair in 1887, I will attempt a few pictures.
These will not be presented to your material vision, dear friends, but an effort to transfer from my own halls of memory the scenes I find closeted there that will call forth for your view what you, too, hold in your memory, but no touch calls out..
We do not forget, I hold; but the normal human mind has in store more or less numerous pictures of the scenes of the past. It needs some circumstance or, perhaps, allusion to bring them to the front. They have not left the mind. They only have been concealed.
Perhaps in the retirement and quiet that comes to the aged, I can bring to your view what has long been covered. Who knows?
Here is the first to offer itself for use as I write. A beautiful, bright morning in autumn, and yet a hazy mist hangs over the hills and over the tree-tops, where "Calls the crow throughout the live-long day." It is early morning and the sun's rising beams are softened, not dimmed, by the pale-yellow haze. Stepping out, I look abroad, and early as it is, I see some children. Why are they so early up and out? Oh! they are gathering beech-nuts for the fair. I turn to go in, and there is not far from me a collection of garden crops beets washed clean for market, squashes whose weight has been marked with pencil near the stem, apples and pears, the choicest the children of the house have found among the piles in the orchard the last weeks, exclaiming,. "Oh, there's a bouncing one for Children's Fair!" They are to be marked by the donors and to be taken to the church when it is opened.
Near by, a neighbor's children are up, and are gleefully chattering over the store of things the parents are designating, asking questions and discussing the merits of the Home for Little Wanderers, or the New Hampshire Orphans' Home, or the boy puts in a plea for the "Seamen, the minister told about Sunday, up to the church."
The air seems full of stir of excitement while the sun looks down through the soft haze, on the scarlet, and purple, and yellow, and brown, and crimson of the fields and woods below him.
Going into the house, my eyes are greeted by a table where are various sorts of articles which must be put on the hay rigging, when the vegetables and fruit go, and there are the provisions for the table committees; the pudding and beans will keep hot for dinner in the cooking stove and furnace ovens at the church hall. "We must take brief time for breakfast, children. The boxes to provide for the people who buy at the auction are above stairs; you may run up to get them from under the eaves. It will help the sale. The grocer has been generous and given the paper bags and wooden boxes. The meat-man gave me a dollar to put in for orphans or temperance, or the sailors; everybody in town gives Children's Fair Day."
All over the town there is this pleasant excitement of the children, in village-house or farm-house, for as yet we have at this time few but New England-born citizens on our farms.
The things have gone to the church. I turn the key in the door and another picture presents itself. Up the street on the Church Common teams are coming to the hall from all parts of the town. The Lockes, Bucknams, Deacon Reuben Taylors, Geo. W. Wheelers, the three Davis' and others from Davis Village; in short, every family at the foot of Binney Hill, and in "No. 6," and Smith's Village, and the south part of the town. They are nearly all patrons and workers in the Children's Fairs, and they come with their gifts and their children. They bring chairs, and crickets, and sleds, and high stools from the shops where their hand-craft was done, and from their farms and neighborhoods, the crops their boys have raised; melons, vegetables, and cranberries, nuts and eggs, needle-books, pin-cushions and mats, edging, mittens and holders, gathered to raise money at the Children's Fair.
148th Children’s Fair - August 15, 2023
James Roger diary entry
28th July 1913
Fair and muggy; wind west; thunder shower about 1:30 P.m. Good rain but not enough. David at Barretts’ in forenoon but stopped by rain. Margaret and I picked over the potatoes, and Dave took a bag for Ayer to Depot in afternoon. Got letter from Hamish at night.
Upcoming Event
163rd Children’s Fair - August 17, 2024
New Ipswich Congregational Church
150 Main Street, New Ipswich, NH
10 AM - 3 PM