Amarillo Tri-State Fair

The fair moved around before it had a home. The historian Lana Payne Barnett placed Amarillo's first fair in 1903 on Llano Cemetery property, though the Handbook dates a first annual Tri-State Fair to 1899. The 1913 Panhandle State Fair opened at Glenwood Electric Park, and the first fair under the Tri-State name, in 1923, used the grounds of the new Municipal Auditorium on Buchanan Street. The 1924 site was nearly 130 acres bought by Potter County between Southeast Third and Tenth avenues. Dora Oliver-Eakle helped found the fair, and Jay Taylor later presided over its association.

What the plaque says

Amarillo Tri-State Fair A number of organized fairs and horse races occurred in this area beginning in the 1890s. The Panhandle State Fair was organized in 1913, but due to World War I large fairs were suspended from 1917 to 1921, when Amarillo was chosen as a permanent home for a regional fair. In 1923 the Amarillo Tri-State Exposition was chartered with participants from Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. In 1924 the property on this site was purchased. The fair was closed again in 1941 for the second World War; its 1947 reopening drew record crowds. Fair activities have included parades, automobile and horse races, livestock and agricultural exhibitions, technological demonstrations, music, sports, and an old settlers' day. The fair hosts about 200,000 people annually. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 4.0 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 6.5 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
• Cadillac Ranch — 11 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 16 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.

More markers nearby

• Amarillo Livestock Auction — 0.8 mi
• Henry Bradley Sanborn — 1.9 mi
• Amarillo — 1.9 mi
• Henry B. Sanborn — 2.0 mi