Vermonters enjoyed carnival rides, comfort food favorites, farm animal displays, live music and more at the Tunbridge World’s Fair on Thursday. The annual event, which has been held since 1867, is taking place until Sunday in the Orange County town it’s named after. Scroll down for more photos of the festivities.

Read the story on VTDigger here: PHOTOS: The Tunbridge World’s Fair kicks off in central Vermont.

This story by Emma Roth-Wells was first published by Valley News on Sept. 11.

TUNBRIDGE — A heavy dew covered the grass on Wednesday morning as 22 veterinary technician students from Vermont State University in Randolph deployed at the Tunbridge World’s Fair grounds.

The students, outfitted in coveralls and rubber boots, along with several faculty and staff members of the university, assisted the fair veterinarian in checking in sheep, goats and cattle who will live in close confines at the fair through Sunday.

“It’s definitely one of the more fun days,” said 19-year-old Des Pouliot, a second-year student at Vermont State University. “You get to get off campus and do actual work.”

The Tunbridge World’s Fair will showcase about 630 animals in total, according to Exhibitor Registration Superintendent Tracy Amell. Numbers are just starting to return up to where they were before 2020, she said. The animals will be the center of attention in events ranging from goat milking demonstrations, swine obstacle courses, poultry and rabbit shows, horse pulling and sheep shearing, just to name a few.

The first trailer hauling cattle pulled up around 8:30 a.m. and off came 3-year-old Alpine and her baby Amaryllis, who was born in December. These light brown Guernseys came from Rockbottom Farm in Strafford and will be shown by 14-year-old Eben Zoerheide.

As the cows came off the trailer, 18-year-old student Blakelee Hoffman used a radio frequency identification tag reader — a handheld, remote-sized device — to ensure the tag numbers in the cows’ ears matched the paperwork.

While other students checked to see if the animals had their vaccine records, Hoffman circled the cows looking for any physical signs of contagious illness, such as a runny nose, skin legion or diarrhea.

“Scrape on the back but I’m guessing it’s from the trailer,” she said, while examining Alpine.

Hoffman grew up on a farm and has shown cows at fairs herself. She said she’d always known she wanted to be a vet.

After about three minutes, the cows were all set and Zoerheide led them to their stalls, their home for the duration of the fair.

The relationship between the school and the fair began two years ago when Amanda Angell, a Vermont State University program technician, realized it could be a win-win opportunity.

Angell grew up on a dairy farm in Randolph and had visited the fair for years. She noticed there was not much of a veterinary presence, plus the students were not getting a lot of experience with large animals. That’s when she thought to herself: ‘Man, we could do cow exams pretty fast’.

“There’s a lot of paperwork with these animals and it can overwhelm the staff,” said Craig Stalnaker, a Vermont State University veterinary technology professor and program coordinator.

Having the students there quickens the pace, according to fair veterinarian Taylor Hull, of South Royalton.

“The students do a significant amount of legwork,” she said, “and it’s a really good opportunity for them to see what’s normal for a cow.”

After training for two years under the previous vet, Hull took over as fair vet in 2021, and incorporated the students into the check-in process. She said it’s rare for anyone not to pass check-in. Over the last two years only one calf had to be sent home — not for health reasons, but because it was too young.

Rachel MacAdams, of East Randolph, hosed down her 2-year-old cow Disco.

“We try to keep them clean for the judges,” she said.

The 34-year-old has been showing cows since she was 4, and has shown at the Tunbridge Fair for 29 years. She said she likes that the students have an opportunity to get experience.

By 10:30 a.m. there was a line of trailers and lots of mooing.

“It’s nice to see this side of the fair with everyone who cares about the animals,” said Vermont State University student Owen Hartman.

Hartman was born and raised in Woodstock and grew up going to the fair. He decided to go to school to be a veterinary technician after seeing some “depressing things” while working at a zoo in Pennsylvania that did not have a good veterinary team. The Vermont State University program is two years long and graduates receive an Associate of Applied Science degree.

“They’re eager, it’s good to see the students excited,” said Kristen Sayers, a program technician.

Not only did the students get valuable large animal experience, but Mark Whitney, the superintendent of oxen, also gave each of them a free day pass to the fair.

The fair kicks off Thursday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and will be open Friday and Saturday 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Animals arrive for annual Tunbridge World’s Fair.

This story by Alex Hanson was first published by the Valley News on July 14.

TUNBRIDGE — In Friday morning’s bright sunshine, Gordie Barnaby surveyed the flood-damaged Tunbridge Fairgrounds and said it could have been worse.

In fact, it has been worse, as recently as 2019, when ice jammed the First Branch of the White River and caused flooding that damaged several buildings.

“We’re lucky,” said Barnaby, who became president of the Union Agricultural Society, the nonprofit group that runs the fair, in December. “It didn’t take any buildings out.”

But the river gored a trench inside the larger of the two oxen barns and scored the ground along the backstretch of the harness racing track. Parts of the grounds are strewn with debris deposited by the river, and long stretches of grass are covered with water, a thick layer of dirt or both.

While the fair’s shareholders and friends have work to do, there is no question about whether the fairgrounds will be ready to host the fair, which is scheduled for Sept. 14-17.

“We’ll make this work,” Barnaby said.

While the ground under the oxen barn was damaged, the building is “still straight as an arrow,” Barnaby said. Marked on the outside is a 1978 high water mark, about head-high on Barnaby. That was another ice-dam flood, he said.

Regular flooding is a hazard of the fair’s location along the river, and organizers have learned to live with it. People moved picnic tables to higher ground before the flooding Monday.

Bob Gray called Hatch Crane Service, a Bradford-based company, to move a footbridge spanning the river by the oxen barn. They sent a crane from a job in Berlin and removed the bridge around 2 p.m. Monday. By 3:30 p.m., the water was up over the bridge abutments.

“If he hadn’t done that, we’d have lost our bridge,” Gray said. “That’s ($20,000 or $30,000). When I called him, he never hesitated.”

The agricultural society expects to take a hit to its revenue. The Woodstock Dog Club’s annual show was set for this week, Thursday through Sunday, but had to be postponed. Other events, right up until two weeks before the fair, likely will be canceled, too.

Not everyone got the memo that the dog show had been canceled. Barnaby spoke to a couple from Indiana on Friday morning who arrived for the show. And an RV with Rhode Island plates was parked on high ground.

“I called the president of one of the two clubs that were putting the show on on Monday at 11:30,” Jon Sowa, who drove up from the Ocean State with his wife, Pamela, and their 13 Havanese dogs, four of which they planned to show.

When the show was called off, “unfortunately, I didn’t get the word,” Sowa said. Not that it wasn’t sent out, he said, he just didn’t see it.

Sowa, who’s retired, said that they cannot go home, as their hardwood floors are being refinished while they’re away. “We’ll have to go someplace,” he said.

Work on repairing the fairgrounds is expected to be steady but not lightning-quick, with people occupied helping flood victims elsewhere in the state. A crew of half a dozen people were taking a break from the heat in an office under the grandstand Friday morning.

“I think we had it pretty easy compared to some of the rest of the state,” said Gray, a retired school administrator. The flooding at the fairgrounds was worse than in Tropical Storm Irene, in 2011, Barnaby said.

Most of the work involves moving dirt back to where it belongs. While the crew sat in the shade, Matt Loftus, a Tunbridge excavating contractor, stopped by.

“I’m going to bring my excavator down,” he told them. “I can scrape the dirt better with that.”

A road project on which he was working on the Strafford Road was held up for the afternoon, Loftus said, so he was switching gears. 

“It’s dry enough out there,” he said.

The fair is two months away, Barnaby said, and there are enough people who care about it to turn out and get the work done. Not that the fair workers would turn down volunteer help, but there are folks with bigger problems right now.

“I think there’s more important things for people who lost their houses and stuff,” Barnaby said. “Help your neighbors.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Organizers confident Tunbridge fair will go on despite flooding.

Editor’s note: This story by Liz Sauchelli was originally published in the Valley News on Feb. 12.

TUNBRIDGE — In the 1860s, 100 like-minded people and families were asked to support a new endeavor.

For $5 in 1867, they could own a piece of the Tunbridge World’s Fair and have a say in how it was managed. That $500 provided the seed money for the Union Agricultural Society, the nonprofit organization that runs the fair.

“Most of them stay within families … so it’s kind of hard to get a hand on one usually,” said Gordon Barnaby, a director of the fair who owns a share through his wife, whose family — the Cilleys — was one of the founding families.

So the auction for a share of the Tunbridge fair, orchestrated on behalf of an estate by Thomas Hirchak Co. in Morrisville, is a rarity.

The share, made out to David and Annie Laber, was originally listed at $10 when the auction began on Jan. 14, said Toby Hirchak, co-owner of the auction house. That would have been a bargain in inflation-adjusted dollars, as $5 in 1867 is worth about $143 now, according to a mix of federal price index data and a historical study.

After about two weeks, the high bid had climbed to $10,000, where it remained as of Friday afternoon.

“We started the thing at no reserve at $10 and we’re going to see how it ends up,” Hirchak said in a phone interview last week. “There seems to be great interest in it.”

Twenty-four people had contributed 93 bids. Most were from Vermont.

Hirchak, who has been in the auction business full time since 1985, said it was the first time he’s put a share of a fair on the block.

“It’s a very unusual opportunity to acquire a very interesting, practical historical thing,” he said.

And that historical value likely outstrips the monetary value, according to Barnaby. Bidders looking for a return on their investment might be disappointed.

“The shareholder basically gets a meal and a couple tickets for the fair,” he said. “They’re not a gold mine to make money off. It’s more the fact to say that you own a piece of the Tunbridge fair I think.”

Then again, a $10,000 sale would be a 2,000-times multiple on the original post-bellum fiver. While Barnaby said he’s heard of shares exchanging hands for $5,000, $10,000 is a new high. Over the last couple years, three or four shares have become available, but it’s not unusual to go a decade without any movement.

“You don’t change a lot of hands by sale,” said Barnaby, who has been a director for 35 years. “There will be a few name changes, a family name … if you get one every couple years you’re doing pretty good and it’s usually something like this where it’s someone who’s deceased and there’s no one to pass it on to.”

The Essex Junction-based Champlain Valley Exposition also was funded by shareholders. Beginning in 1922, shares were sold for $50 to fund the annual fair, said Tim Shea, executive director of the nonprofit organization. There are roughly 1,000 shareholders who get to vote at the annual meeting and, if they fill out an annual survey, receive two free 10-day passes. While all shareholders are invited to the meeting, usually 30 to 40 attend.

“They’re cherished,” Shea said of the shares in a phone interview. “It’s kind of neat when someone comes in and says, ‘Hey, my grandfather willed this to me,’ and we transfer the share. It’s special to keep it in the family.”

Shea said he’s unaware of any shares of the Champlain Valley Exposition going up for auction and, if someone sold a share privately, the nonprofit organization wouldn’t be made aware of it.

“The Tunbridge Fair is a special event and Tunbridge is a special place in Vermont, so I can see why there’s so much interest in a share to that wonderful event,” Shea said.

While many Tunbridge fair stakeholders live in the region, “as time goes everyone expands a little further out,” Barnaby said. Some live as far as California. The annual meeting requires a majority of shareholders to be present, and those who are unable to attend can send proxy voters in their places.

“The Tunbridge Fair has been there for quite a while, so there’s a lot of people that want to say they own something of the fair. People have had shares for years and years and they say they don’t understand how they can be worth that much. But those same people wouldn’t sell their shares,” Barnaby said. “If somebody offered us $10,000 for it, we probably wouldn’t sell either.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Get your fair share: Auction offers a stake in Tunbridge World’s Fair.

Editor’s Note: This story by Claire Potter first appeared in the Valley News on Sept. 17.

Susan Cain stood outside the Log Cabin Museum at the Tunbridge World’s Fair on Thursday in a homestead-style yellow floral dress and no shoes.

“It’s been a really hard year,” she said. With her family dispersed across the country, the 81-year-old spent much of the year isolated because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cain oversees the museum, complete with spinning wheels and an old-school general store. The fair had to be canceled last year, and she is glad to be back. Her first love is weaving — pulling up the weedy flax grass at the end of July and transforming its stringy interior into linen. On the fair’s first day on Thursday, she displayed samples of her work and handled the wooden antique tools she uses for her craft.

All of the fair’s Antique Hill hummed with 1920s farm equipment brought back to life, the regular beat of axes hitting logs and the thumping of a blacksmith’s hammer. It was education day at the fair, and busloads of children investigated the one-room schoolhouse, the printing press and the historical reenactments. Homestead traditions brought to life proved as popular as ever, and Antique Hill is growing.

Dennis Cilley, a lifelong Tunbridge resident, has big plans for Antique Hill. He is in charge of everything on the hill except the museum — including the printing press, the barn full of carriages and wagons, and the blacksmith shop, where he apprenticed as a boy. He was helping at the apple press and distributing cider with his two sons.

“It’s old Vermont,” he said. “This stuff isn’t done anywhere anymore.”

Each year, there is a new addition to the hill — like the antique wood splitter that joined the menagerie of old machines. Cilley pointed out a row of young maple trees planted in an even row. Soon there will be shops between them and perhaps a church at the end of the lane, “like a little Main Street,” he said. The beams that Mario and Isaac Sacca, of Tunbridge, were hewing from logs just a few feet away would be part of a 20-by-20-foot store.

Elliott Morse’s family has been sugaring at their farm in Montpelier for 200 years. He reenacted his ancestors’ work as he manned a wood-powered sugaring evaporator attached to a red sap bucket mounted on a one-horse sleigh.

“I’ve been sugaring since I was this tall,” he said, lifting his hand to just under 4 feet. “It’s in my veins to make syrup. I can’t think of not sugaring.”

For well over a year, though, Morse has had to stay away from the Morse Farm. He is over 80, and his doctor told him to avoid the steady flow of tourists because of the pandemic. So he has been driving a delivery truck for an auto parts store — “I’m not one to sit around,” he said.

The volunteers behind the buzz of activity on Antique Hill are confident that the next generation would keep their traditions alive. Cain, of the Log Cabin Museum, taught Laura Craft, 56, to spin yarn from wool, and Craft has brought her 13-year-old daughter, Alice, to the fair every year since she was born.

Sarah Corrigan and Brad Salon, who run a school for “ancestral skills” in Corinth, toured the booths with their baby, Ash. At the ROOTS School, they use many of the same tools and natural materials as the historical reenactors. More than anything, they said that they and their students want to reconnect with the natural world by working with natural materials and practicing the skills in “everyone’s ancestry.”

“Making these things with hands and tools, there’s a direct understanding to it — it’s technical and involved, and there’s a beauty to working with natural materials,” Corrigan said. “But there’s a competency that’s hard to feel with modern technology. If my cellphone breaks, competency is a moot point.”

Although Antique Hill was busy, the absence of two people was also noteworthy. Former longtime Town Moderator Euclid Farnham, an eighth-generation Vermonter, died this year at 87. The former dairy farmer helped transform the fair into a family affair and with his wife, Priscilla, was a constant, steady presence on Antique Hill. Priscilla Farnham was not there Thursday morning.

The Farnhams had recruited Cain to the fair decades earlier.

“Right where I am in my life, I’ll always be thankful for people who led me down the path I followed,” Cain said.

“I miss them both,” she added.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge fair brings past to present with ancestral skills and crafting.

This story was written by Rose Terami of Tunbridge, a freshman studying virtually at Loyola University Maryland this fall, for VTDigger’s new platform for student journalism, the Underground Workshop.

On Sept. 20, several historical reenactors from the Tunbridge Fair’s “Antique Hill” exhibit gathered on the fairgrounds to commemorate the canceled event. In jeans and jackets instead of their usual period attire, they sat at picnic tables on the empty Antique Hill lawn, trading favorite stories from the fair in years past.

In a normal year, Antique Hill — which slopes upward from the rest of the fairgrounds — would be filled with fairgoers, the rhythmic hum of old machinery at work, and the crack of gunfire every hour from the Civil War soldiers on the lawn.

Emily Howe works in the colonial kitchen located in the “Log Cabin” building on the hill. “It’s woodsmoke and spice; it’s pickle juice; it’s coffee grounds,” she said of the odor that pervades the cabin during fairtime. “There’s a little cow smell that wanders up from the barns.” 

Each year, Howe is able to catch up with individuals who she may see only during the four-day fair each year. “99% of the hugs that I give and receive in the entire year happen at the fair,” she said.

Dawn Hancy, who demonstrates the drop spindle — a historical tool used to “twirl” sheep’s wool into yarn — makes a tradition of strolling the midway in costume every Sunday morning before clocking in on the hill, mixing with fairgoers from the 21st century. With a coffee and an “obscenely huge chocolate muffin” in hand, she sat on the metal bleachers overlooking the oxen-pulling arena.

“There’s an energy that’s still alive, even without the fair in town this year,” she said. “It feels like the land has held the community of the fair.”  

Antique Hill is best known for its period reenactments, which, in Hancy’s words, represent a “hodgepodge of historical time periods” that span from the early Colonial period to the turn of the century. 

Covid-19 isn’t the only thing that’s gotten in the fair’s way in the past. The event has been canceled twice before, once due to the Spanish Influenza in 1918 and again for a brief period during the Second World War. 

“This is supposed to be full of people and noise and smells,” said Sue Cain, who demonstrates textile crafts during the fair each year, spinning flax into linen thread and weaving on the circa 19th-century authentic Tunbridge loom.

In the colonial kitchen, head cook Eve Ermer usually enjoys narrating to an audience of visitors while she tends to a chicken slowly turning above hot coals in the hearth. In lieu of reenacting this year, Ermer took matters into her own hands and crafted a makeshift fire pit outdoors at her Tunbridge home, where she recreated several dishes that would have been made during a typical year at the fair.

 “It was weird to be cooking at a fire without a skirt [on],” she said, remembering the heavy period clothing that she would usually be donning during the fair. She also missed the “sound of the midway through the chimney” in the kitchen. 

Beyond the kitchen is a turn-of-the-century model general store exhibit where shopkeepers sell visitors penny candy, pickles, apples, homemade doughnuts, and wedges of sharp cheddar cheese. 

Out the door, the lawn of Antique Hill would normally bustle with activity: Civil War soldiers sitting around a campfire drinking out of tin mugs; spinners and fiber-artists working at their wheels; basket weavers turning pliable strips of bark into functional carriers; and men dressed in plaid shirts and overalls pressing cider and shaping logs into benches with draw-shave knives. 

In other years, the blacksmith shop demonstrates the centuries-old practice of creating practical items from solid iron ore. In the circa 1840 one-room schoolhouse, a schoolmarm gives lessons on “reading, writing, and rithmetic.” The barns offer even more antique treasures: old agricultural equipment, vehicles, and tools that represent a way of life long since forgotten by most people.

“There’s so much tradition here,” said Laura Craft, who demonstrates the carding and spinning of raw fleece into wool on Antique Hill. 

Across from the kitchen, Karla Klotz usually dips long wicks in hot wax to demonstrate the art of candle making. “[Reenacting] really connects us with the past,” she said, noting that young visitors to Antique Hill in particular seem receptive and curious to learn about history.

 Sue Cain usually works alongside Klotz. “We get people that come through who really have no clue what all of this is all about,” she said. She and other reenactors on Antique Hill have the opportunity to “teach others about how people used to live.” 

Whether it’s cider pressing, spinning wool, cooking, rug hooking, quilting, or making bobbin lace, Cain said visitors to the Log Cabin get to meet some “people who make a living with their hands.”

For many, Antique Hill provides some insight into the hardships as well as the blessings of a way of life void of many of the conveniences and luxuries we have access to today. Perhaps it’s the satisfaction of tending to a task from start to finish, or the simplicity of self-sufficiency that makes these periods of history so intriguing. 

Sue Cain’s words ring true for many of the reenactors on Antique Hill: “I was probably born in the wrong century.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: “There’s so much tradition here” : Giving thanks for the Tunbridge Fair.

This article by Alex Hanson was published by the Valley News on May 26.

TUNBRIDGE — For the first time since World War II, the annual World’s Fair has been canceled.

The board of the Union Agricultural Society, the Tunbridge nonprofit that operates the fair and its grounds, had planned to meet next week to decide whether to hold the fair, which began in 1867. But Gov. Phil Scott ordered on Friday that “traditional fairs and festivals are … canceled until further notice.”

“We pretty much knew it was coming,” Alan Howe, the fair’s president, said Tuesday.

Since 1867, the fair has been canceled only for the 1918 flu pandemic and for World War II. This year’s fair, scheduled for Sept. 17-20, would have been the 149th.

“It’s a hard thing to have to do,” Howe said, “but this whole epidemic is a hard thing to swallow.”

The Union Agricultural Society’s annual revenue amounts to $600,000 to $650,000 a year, according to tax documents. A big chunk of that is paid out to the many people who work at the fair. Not included in that figure is the money taken in by the fair’s vendors.

There has never been a study of the fair’s broader economic impact, Howe said. But the influx of visitors has an influence on everything from convenience stores to local fire and rescue departments that raise money at coin drops.

Howe said he feels particularly badly for the fair’s many youth competitors, who show everything from artwork to cattle to vegetables and flowers at the fair each year.

The Tunbridge World’s Fair is not the only Upper Valley agricultural fair to call off this year’s installment.

The North Haverhill Fair Association has canceled the late July fair, according to an announcement on the fair’s website.

The announcement cited the May 18 decision by New Hampshire 4-H not to participate in any fairs as a major reason not to hold an “in-person” event.

The association still hopes to hold a virtual event, and noted that it will pay its property tax bill to the town of Haverhill out of its reserves.

“We waited as long as we could to make this decision, hoping that there would be a way to proceed which would minimize the impact to our local economy, but at this point there isn’t one,” the board said in a statement on the fair’s website.

And the board of the Cornish Fair is scheduled to meet Monday to decide the fate of this year’s festivities, scheduled for Aug. 21-23, said Steve Taylor, a Meriden farmer and a member of the fair’s board.

The board discussed whether to cancel at its last meeting, on May 4, but opted to wait.

Health officials were divided on whether to cancel immediately or to wait a few weeks to see what might happen, Taylor said in an email Tuesday.

Several New Hampshire fairs had already announced plans to close and discussion on May 4 suggested that holding the Cornish Fair would be “a tough proposition,” Taylor said.

“Already there were indications of food and commercial vendors bowing out, food-serving challenges looked insurmountable, social distancing around activities like the pulling contests and woodsmen’s show could be impossible to enforce, and so on,” Taylor said. “More recently New Hampshire 4-H Club activities have been shut down by UNH Extension, which pulls the plug on a core part of the fair.”

And if organizers went ahead with the fair and drew only a fraction of the attendance needed to cover such basic expenses as insurance and tent rentals, the fair could go bankrupt, Taylor said.

While the Cornish Fair bills itself as a small, close-knit event, the World’s Fair draws as many as 50,000 people to Tunbridge to mark the unofficial end to summer.

“We’re planning on being back next year,” Howe said. “That’s about all we can do right now.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge World’s Fair, North Haverhill Fair canceled for 2020.

This story by Jordan Cuddemi was published by the Valley News on Jan. 28.

TUNBRIDGE — Officials with the Tunbridge World’s Fair will have to wait for a spring thaw to assess the amount of damage from a recent ice jam to at least a half dozen barns on the roughly 30-acre fairgrounds.

The good news? All of the damage can be repaired, and this year’s fair in September won’t be impacted, World’s Fair vice president Gordon Barnaby said on Monday.

“We are good at bouncing back,” said Barnaby, a member of the fair’s board of directors for more than 35 years. “It could be worse.”

Because of warming temperatures and heavy rain last Thursday, about eight livestock barns took a beating as a massive ice buildup flowed off the First Branch of the White River and crashed into the structures that typically house oxen, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and horses during the fair.

Fortunately, other buildings on the property that house expensive fair equipment, and which double as fee-based storage for area residents’ campers, cars and boats, were unaffected by the ice.

On Monday, between 4 and 5 feet of ice covered the ground both inside and outside of the barns, many of which had broken doors that will need repairing. Just what else will need tending to remains unknown until the ice thaws and moves down river, World’s Fair secretary Peg Sherlock said.

Barnaby, Sherlock and treasurer Doug Giles walked around atop the ice on Monday and compared the scene to past significant weather events. A “high water” mark from the flood of 1978 adorned the side of one of the barns; the ice sat roughly two feet below that line.

It’s no surprise that the fairgrounds have seen their fair share of flooding. After all, the grounds are in the floodplain. That aside, the trio had trouble pinpointing a year where the ice had built up quite this high.

“We had ice here as (recently) as two or three years ago, but it wasn’t as bad as this,” Barnaby said. “It usually comes through and gets right out.”

“It’s impressive,” Sherlock said. “But it sure makes a mess.”

In a field of unknowns, one thing is for sure: When the ice thaws, Tunbridge-area residents will be there to assist in any rebuilding efforts.

Fair officials posted pictures of the damage on Facebook on Sunday, and within 24 hours, dozens of people had pledged their time.

“We will have help down here as soon as the ice starts going out,” Barnaby said.

Barnaby, who scoped the fairgrounds out at the start of the weekend, said on Monday that the landscape “is looking better now than it did on Friday.”

The river was partially diverted out of its banks and onto fairground property and is running next to the Fiber Nook barn.

The hope is it will redirect itself back into its bed and take the ice with it, Barnarby said.

“It’s improving,” he said.

But the fair isn’t out of hot — or cold — water yet. If the temperatures fluctuate too much and send more ice downriver toward the fairgrounds before the current ice has a chance to break up, the situation could worsen, Barnaby said.

For now, he and the others remained positive.

In addition to the barn doors, the new animal washing station near the cattle and oxen barns will need fixing, as will at least one fence on the property. The front of the Fiber Nook building sustained some damage.

The Tunbridge World’s Fair has operated since 1867, except in 1918 due to the great flu epidemic, and during World War II, according to the fair’s Facebook page.

Asked whether the fair would go on uninterrupted this September, Barnaby didn’t even blink.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’ll be here, ready to go.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Floes from ice jam damage Tunbridge Fairgrounds buildings.

[V]ermont’s two major party candidates for governor faced off for the first time Friday morning in a wide-ranging debate in which Democratic challenger, Christine Hallquist, and Republican incumbent, Gov. Phil Scott, clashed on issues including taxes, marijuana and education.

Friday’s debate, held at the Tunbridge World’s Fair and hosted by WDEV Radio, brought into focus the many areas that the two relatively moderate candidates disagree.

On some issues, like taxation and regulation of marijuana, their platforms are starkly opposed. Hallquist embraces a legal market for marijuana to curtail the risk of laced cannabis on the black market and generate revenue. Scott refuses to support such a system until the state finds a way to fund additional highway safety and substance use prevention initiatives.

Hallquist believes the state should fight to keep Vermont’s small schools open arguing that they’re a draw for potential residents. While Scott didn’t openly advocate for closing small schools, he pointed out that schools in some towns, like Rochester, only have a handful of students in each grade level, and said he would instead prioritize funding early childhood education and vocational training programs.

“We have to think about the kids and what’s best for them,” Scott said.

Hallquist argued schools’ woes are a symptom of a larger problem: a faltering rural economy.

“The reason these schools are dwindling is because the jobs don’t exist,” she said. “We should be building toward restoring our rural economy.”

Hallquist pitched her plan to expand broadband to every home and business in the state as a solution for many of the state’s financial woes including its aging population, antiquated farms and struggling rural businesses.

Her plan calls for requiring electric companies to hang broadband cables, rather than internet companies, a shift she says will lower the cost of expanding internet access throughout the state.

Improving internet connectivity in Vermont will encourage more people, including entrepreneurs, to settle outside of the state’s urban bubbles and inspire more small businesses to set up shop there, according to Hallquist.

“You will not get young people to Vermont if they can’t get connected,” she said.

She also said that better internet access would be a economic boon for the agricultural sector. Struggling farmers — including those in the dairy industry grappling with low milk prices — would benefit from improved internet connection, giving them the opportunity to sell some of their products online, Hallquist argued.

“That’s how we’re going to help farmers get out of this in the long-term,” she said.

Although Scott acknowledged that better internet access is “part of the equation” in developing Vermont’s economy, he said it’s hardly the silver bullet.

He noted that 90 percent of Vermont’s communities already have broadband access, including towns like Newport and Springfield, which are farther away from Vermont’s biggest urban centers.

“It’s not the entire answer,” Scott said of internet connectivity. “We have to address some of the cost problems we have in the state, some of the affordability issues we face as a state.”

Scott’s economic strategy continues to be defined by his effort to prevent new tax hikes, fees and policies that would place additional costs on Vermonters and businesses operating in the state.

If re-elected, Scott said he would continue to oppose proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour or create paid family leave programs, unless such programs were were voluntary. The paid family leave plan pitched in the last legislative session would have been funded by a payroll tax on employees.

Hallquist has blasted Scott for vetoing the minimum wage and paid family leave bills and called the state’s failure to hike the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of inflation a “systemic attack on the working class.”

“It’s a way to keep the money with the wealthy,” she said.

Scott criticized Hallquist — who is proposing a plan to offer free college tuition, and is championing a single payer health care system — for having a “knee jerk reaction” to raise taxes. She retorted that the incumbent governor’s approach to universally denying tax and fee increases would come back to bite him.

“A good business person doesn’t just do cost control, because cost control puts you out of business,” she said.

The governor boasted that during his first term, his administration prevented $71 million in property tax hikes, and it’s likely that the governor would continue to oppose any and all proposed tax increases in a second term.

But in an interview Friday, he acknowledged there is one factor that could make him think twice, and end his pledge against new taxes and fees: the state’s ever-growing debt from unpaid pensions.

“The elephant in the room so to speak is the unfunded liability for pensions that absorbs an incredible amount of money regardless of the growth of the economy,” he said. “So we have to weigh all that out and figure out if we can continue.”

He stressed that for now, he isn’t contemplating any new taxes, and that to sanction any additional levies would be an “absolute last resort.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Candidates for governor clash in first general election debate.

(This story by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling was published in the Valley News on Sept. 15, 2017.)

TUNBRIDGE — Thursday marked the first day of the Tunbridge World’s Fair, and Peter Gearwar, a former McNamara Dairy worker, was sitting helmeted behind an ebony horse, the two large wheels beneath him painting clean lines in the dirt of the track as he raced by the grandstand in a quest to win a $630 prize.

Roughly 100 spectators sitting on the steeply sloped grandstand seats cheered as Doug Cater, the announcer, told them what they could already see: On the first of two half-mile laps, Gearwar’s harness racing horse, East Creek Nick, was in the lead, with two other horses — Luck E Trooper and Famous Oscar — crowding close behind. The horses aren’t allowed to break into a full gallop, but have to maintain a certain gait, covering a deceptive amount of dirt with their speedy trot.

One of the cheering spectators was an equestrian named Sarah Yarosevich, of Grafton, who said she loves coming to the fair as a rare opportunity to celebrate the state’s heritage.

“This one in particular, because it’s so agriculturally oriented. I like the history of the buildings. It’s a view into yesteryear — yester-century. I enjoy that,” she said. “It’s just one example of an interaction between a human being and an animal. A partnership. I think it’s worth seeing.”

After running by the grandstand, the horses turned the bend and disappeared into the back half of the track, where they could only be glimpsed between the cracks left by a field of recreational vehicles, trailers and food booths with large signs urging fairgoers to buy corn dogs, cotton candy, lemonade, fried dough and, in one case, “Bubba’s Bacon.”

“Just like people, animals are individuals,” Yarosevich said. “They have their own temperaments and personalities and abilities to excel in different areas of employment.”

The announcer’s voice took on an excited tone as he called the crowd’s attention back to the horses, which were coming back into view from around the bend and preparing for a final sprint to the finish line.

“It’s still East Creek Nick, Famous Oscar!” the announcer said. One of the enduring excitements of harness racing, which has been featured at the World’s Fair for more than 100 years, is that during the final moments of the race, there’s no longer any incentive for a rider to bide his time. The finish nearly always features a horse — in this case, Famous Oscar, urged on by his jockey, Nelson Haley, with an active whip — throwing itself into a last-ditch attempt for a come-from-behind victory against the lead, in this case a tenuous and shrinking one held by East Creek Nick.

“Famous Oscar I think is coming out of second on the outside,” Cater announced, “down to the stretch they go … It’s East Creek Nick! Famous Oscar, Luck E Trooper gets in for third.”

As Gearwar and the other racers headed back out of sight to take the tack off of their animals, Gearwar’s father, Robert Gearwar, leaned up against the grandstand railing and watched, holding a clipboard and a rubber-banded packet of one-sheet racing programs he was selling for a dollar. He went to his first harness race as a boy in 1960, he said, when his father-in-law told him “if you want to win and bet your money, keep your money in your pocket. You’ll be a winner.”

Harness racing is an example of what sets the Tunbridge World’s Fair apart from other regional attractions, he said.

“You know, a lot of fairs don’t have racing anymore. They’ve gone out,” he said. “I don’t think there’s as many people (who) have the resources anymore.”

Around the back of the track, Peter Gearwar was talking about the victory with East Creek Nick’s owner, Earl Kipp Jr., a retired highway department worker from Bennington who trains his horses in Rutland. East Creek Nick has had other victories in Tunbridge.

“He had a good chance. He loves it here,” said Gearwar, 52. He’s been racing horses since he was a teen. “Of all the fairs, I think he races the best here as he does anywhere. I don’t know if he gets hyped up seeing all the stuff or what.”

The Tunbridge fair was built on harness racing — literally. The first feature of the former hayfield was the 1-mile racetrack, built in the aftermath of the Civil War; the first structures were the grandstand and the judge’s stand. But over the 146 years the fair has been featuring the races, the harness racing community that once was evenly distributed throughout the region’s working farmland now is all but gone from the area. The increasing costs to compete, and the overall decline of horses in daily life, have concentrated modern-day races into larger venues, where the larger crowds lead to larger payouts — East Creek Nick took a shot at a $10,200 prize at the casino racecourse in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., last week.

“To get people to come to the fairs now is tough,” Gearwar said. “There’s not as many local people as there used to be. It used to be a lot more mom and pop. It’s gotten a lot more expensive, so it’s hard for people to do it.”

Gearwar said he’s only able to participate himself in partnership with Kipp.

“He trains them and he lets me drive them,” Gearwar said. “I get all the glory.”

In Kipp’s best year in recent memory, he took in more than $15,000, but he said he’s in it for the pleasure of the sport.

“I train them seven days a week,” Kipp said of the horses. “I drive them usually every day, about 2 to 5 miles.”

On the track, the third and final race of the day was underway. Cater, though a year older, sounded just as excited as he was last year. The crowd still strained their necks to see the horses coming around the bend, but they were just a bit less numerous than they were for the first race. And behind the grandstand, in the fair midway, people were stopping to admire the blacksmith museum exhibit, a stark reminder of what happens when a feature of the agricultural era falls out of practice altogether.

The Tunbridge World’s Fair runs through Sunday.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Harness racing endures at Tunbridge World’s Fair.

Editor’s note: In This State  is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.

Beads of perspiration are forming on his forehead, and some are dripping down his cheeks, and occasionally he swats a mosquito, but Jack Rowell is in his zone now, concentrating on the teenage girl before him, judging the light, the background, looking for that perfect fraction of a second when an aspect of her personality shines through. His Nikon D700 clicks away as he speaks words of encouragement and gives direction to the young lady, whose mother, standing under the canopy of tall maples, smiles with approval.

“Weight on your back foot. Chin down a bit. Shoulders toward me. That’s beautiful!” says Rowell, who is working on a “Sweet 16” (birthday) assignment in the dappled light of late afternoon on Braintree Hill. He and his subject are standing in a patch of bracken ferns on property belonging to the Braintree Fish and Game Club, a spot he has used in the past for portraiture. It’s just a short way up from his house.

“Don’t tell the tree huggers,” Rowell mutters in his gravelly voice as he bends a sapling to accommodate his tripod. To get a rise from others, he often uses phrases like “tree-huggers,” “flatlanders” or “trust funders.” It’s his shtick to poke anyone who flaunts privilege or tries to impose values. There’s a streak of contrariness in Jack Rowell, and you have to like him for it.

Rowell would make a great portrait himself, but you would want him holding the camera, because few have a better eye. Photographically speaking, he gets the best from people.

Balding, with a bushy mustache, hair reaching to his shoulders, he may even resemble some of the characters he shot at the Tunbridge World’s Fair in the 1960s ‘70s and 80s, back in the days of black and white photos, back in the days of the girlie shows, the “cussin,’” the fisticuffs on the midway, and the “whisky-drinking” with which he admits some familiarity, though he has gotten through those years as has the fair itself, which now bills itself as family entertainment.

Rowell began his photographic career at the fairgrounds with a borrowed 35-millimeter Petri that a friend brought back from Vietnam during the war. He shot ride scenes, and cows and fruit pies with blue ribbons, but mostly people, capturing expressions that ran the gamut. In his portfolio are guys who looked like they belong in jail and grandmothers sweet as can be. His own grandmother lived just across from the fairgrounds, and his father worked in town as a logger and designer and builder of coffee tables. The fairgrounds is where Rowell spent a good chunk of his boyhood when he wasn’t fishing.

One of his favorite shots, in fact, was taken at the fair. It’s of a farmer wearing a broad-brimmed hat and sitting in a rocking chair in front of corn stalks, with a sign boldly asserting: “The reasons politicians are crooked is because YOU are! Repent today!

That photo appeared in a book titled “Tunbridge Fair: Photographs by Jack Rowell,” published in 1980 by the Herald of Randolph, where Rowell back in the day worked for $1 a photo. “I also worked as a dishwasher, gravedigger and flagman,” Rowell says.

There’s another fair shot of guys playing a roulette game with a live mouse that is released and expected to run into a numbered hole of its choosing, an endeavor PETA might frown upon today. And a poignant shot of a man with his Labrador, the fellow looking like a dog’s best friend.

“Oh, for sure, he’s an artist,” says John O’Brien the filmmaker, emphasizing the obvious. Rowell worked with O’Brien in the ‘90s on the Vermont cult classic, “Man With A Plan,” the political spoof starring now-deceased Tunbridge farmer Fred Tuttle, who after the movie went on to actually run for office, winning the GOP primary against a carpetbagger, then endorsing Democrat Patrick Leahy. O’Brien, Tuttle and Rowell traveled together everywhere, to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., to promote the movie. Rowell recorded it all photographically. His shots of Fred Tuttle became iconic.

“He’s is a great photographer, and it’s been fascinating to see his work evolve from the rough street photographs of the fair to his studio and other work. He shows professionalism without losing the human touch,” says O’Brien, who admits Rowell’s demeanor might appear more consistent with that of a “deer-jacker” than a talented photographer.

“He likes his subjects animated, and he encourages them to be expressive,” says Sara Tucker of Randolph, who teamed with Rowell on the “Hale Street Gang Portraits and Writing” project, the acclaimed endeavor that has made the rounds of galleries and exhibit halls in the state.

Tucker, who attended high school with Rowell before going off to New York for work in writing and editing, returned for family reasons and wound up helping a dozen people at the Greater Randolph Senior Center write their memoirs. Rowell took the photographs, evocative 17-by-22-inch black-and-white portraits.

“It’s sort of magic the way he puts people at ease,” says Tucker. “He is so just so laid-back, and natural, but he can be a bit of a clown, when necessary. …

“And you can tell right away if he likes you,” emphasizes Tucker. “I don’t think he takes many pictures of people he doesn’t like.”

Rowell’s studio in Randolph, with the mounted 35-pound king salmon that he caught on Lake Ontario looking down from a wall, is jammed with tripods, camera cases, strobes, light-mods, and posters with his photos, including one of Fred Tuttle standing at the U.S. Capitol. He shows photos of a gal with a tattoo, a couple on a motorcycle, Little Leaguers, participants in fishing derbies, and Canadian fiddler Natalie McMaster performing at the Lebanon, N.H., opera house and at Chandler Music Hall in Randolph. One of his photos graces the cover of a McMaster CD.

He shoots for the Lake Champlain International Fishing Derby, and last month photographed Miss Vermont posing as though she were about to kiss a big but not adorable smallmouth bass. Someone encouraged her to do that, but Rowell denies it was he.

“I am a cultural documentarian,’” says Jack Rowell, when pressed to describe himself. He says that with an ironic smile, because to Rowell that probably sounds pretentious.

Dirk Van Susteren is a freelance reporter and editor who lives in Calais.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In This State: From Fred Tuttle to Miss Vermont, Jack Rowell documents Vermonters in portrait.

Over the course of the last year, VTDigger.org has published hundreds of stories, most of which would fit in the straight news category. Once in a while though, we like to get beyond politics and public policy and tap our stable of essay writers for insight into issues, like Facebook fandom, McHouses, global warming, Vermontee nostalgia, a snowbird’s perilous trip down Florida’s I-95 and life under the Golden Bubble. Some are serious, others are zany satires. Here are 10 of our most thought-provoking pieces from 2010. Enjoy, and Happy New Year from all the writers at VTDigger.org.
~Anne Galloway, editor

Vermont architecture: The get-lost effect gets recognized
By Donald M. Kreis on April 17, 2010
What’s modest about a house that, with its adjoining and newly built barn, has almost 10,000 square feet of space and occupies a 210-acre parcel of land? Continue reading

Exile from Facebook Nation
By Barbara Ann Curcio on August 10, 2010
I don’t want you to know my whereabouts every minute of the day (“Status”), or the most boring, inane details of my life (mucking the horses now–I’m in deep doo-doo!). Don’t need to play FarmVille; I live there in real life. And I actually LIKE my privacy. Continue reading

The global volcanic feedback loop
By Terry J. Allen on May 25, 2010
If researchers are right about the impact of glacier melt and rising seas, volcanic and earthquake activity will accelerate. We are in for a hell of a ride. Continue reading

Personal essay: A contrarian view of the Tunbridge World’s Fair
By Donald M. Kreis on September 24, 2010 | Edit
The point here is not to idealize the 1939 New York fair.The point is that a forward-looking orientation is an infinitely more satisfying, inspiring and, frankly, honest source of pleasure than the false nostalgia served up every September in Tunbridge. Continue reading

BigPharma, the Orgasmatron and restless vagina syndrome
By Terry J. Allen on March 2, 2010
By promoting the idea that “normal” women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch “female sexual dysfunction.” Continue reading

Antibiotic ban leaves farmers in a tough spot
By Terry J. Allen on August 10, 2010 | Edit
Many farmers and organic proponents recognize the USDA’s 100 percent ban on antibiotics needs to be re-examined in light of a growing concerns about animal welfare. Continue reading

Interstate 95: Drive it if you can
By Barbara Ann Curcio on June 30, 2010
Snowbirds from Vermont need a tank–make that a whole squadron of them–to feel secure negotiating the fearsome traffic and speed of the Florida Interstate. Continue reading

Death raises questions about U.S. conflict in Afghanistan
By Anne Galloway on July 4, 2010
How do we honor the war dead and those who have returned from the battlefield suicidal or permanently maimed? We use the euphemism “ultimate sacrifice” to describe soldiers killed in conflict, but have we lost a shared sense of that sacrifice? Continue reading

Food stamps, soda and the sweet nanny state
By Terry J. Allen on November 24, 2010
Mayor Bloomberg asked the Department of Agriculture to allow a two-year pilot program that adds soda to the list of items that the city’s food stamp recipients cannot buy with benefits. Continue reading

Digger Dirt: Farewell to the Golden Bubble, for now
By Anne Galloway on May 13, 2010
Though the Statehouse can seem like high school on steroids, in committee legislators plod through painstaking legal minutiae and wade through technical testimony like pros. Continue reading

Read the story on VTDigger here: Essays 2010: From Facebook Nation and the perils of I-95 to the Tunbridge Fair.

It was not the greasy and overpriced food. Nor was it the expensive and sometimes dilapidated rides, the relentless traffic jam on Route 110, the chump-appeal of the carney barkers, nor the blatantly disparate treatment given the two major political parties with official booths there.

What really set me off, on my third day at the Tunbridge World’s Fair in the company of my eight- and four-year-old offspring, was the elaborate exhibition hall that had been created by the local historical society. It is there one finds a respectable array of artifacts from Vermont’s agrarian past – everything from farm implements of the horse-drawn era to civil war uniforms (both sides!) to a working, gasoline-powered wood-splitter. Women in period costumes earnestly sew, churn, spin and otherwise tend to the same chores with which their great-great grandmothers might have occupied themselves.

What’s wrong with this picture? I think the irony of the fair’s name, which ostensibly points ahead rather than backward, is beginning to lose its appeal.

Consider, for example, a competing world’s fair that sprang up, briefly, in a not-too-distant city, during a time of global anxiety that is not so dissimilar to the state of the planet today. I refer to the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair.

“The World of Tomorrow” was that fair’s official theme. Among the exhibits to which people flocked was the General Motors “Futurama,” a ride through an imagined America of 1960 that strongly resembled the nation that did, in fact, emerge.

“If we listen carefully to those people who were there and can’t help but smile when we mention the topic, we can still hear today the resonant roar of a good, bold, brilliant future just over the edge of time,” wrote David Gelernter in his book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. “Seeing as I have the piles of meticulously preserved fair memorabilia that survive today all over the country, I am willing to bet that somewhere pressed in a scrapbook there is a yellow flower that tells us something about love and the fair.”

Indeed, I myself have a piece of that lost world on a shelf in my office – a square piggy bank, made of glass so that one could see an accumulating future in saved pennies, bearing the name of the fair along with a depiction of the tall Trylon and the round Perisphere that stood at the center of the fairgrounds. My grandmother gave it to me – the same grandmother whose family migrated at the turn of the 20th Century from Europe to the mining boomtown of Butte, Montana in quest of a great future that is my inheritance.

The point here is not to idealize the 1939 New York fair, which exuded commercialism, reeked of racism and failed to foresee the destructive implications of the sprawl it conjured as our future. The point is that a forward-looking orientation is an infinitely more satisfying, inspiring and, frankly, honest source of pleasure than the false nostalgia served up every September in Tunbridge.

Life in the rural America conjured by the fair’s historical exhibition wasn’t bold and brilliant – it was hard and miserable. Unremitting toil, rampant disease, and isolation were the norms – as well as sheer darkness. Nine out of ten rural homes in the U.S. had no electricity in the mid-1930s until the electrification program of the New Deal financed customer-owned utilities like the Washington and Vermont electric cooperatives.

The Tunbridge World’s Fair elides these realities, serves up a heaping helping of their lingering legacy, and unapologetically demands that fairgoers suspend judgment about the whole thing.

All of that unwholesome fried, fatty food? An echo of an era when the lack of available refrigeration made such a diet inevitable. The carnival games like the one that conned my daughter into paying five bucks for a tiny, 50-cent stuffed animal? An echo of a time when farm-dwelling fairgoers were isolated and vulnerable to the manipulative ways of city slickers. The expensive and rickety rides, staffed by guest workers unable to speak English and, thus, to talk with their patrons? A throwback to the era before labor laws, safety regulations and consumer protection.

This is not to suggest that the rides are illegal or unsafe. I mean only that the 40 bucks a day I spent to allow me and my two kids to take a few rides on the bumper cars and carousel did not seem like money well spent. I’d rather pay the bus fare for a ride down Avenue Pierre Dupuy in Montreal for a look at Habitat, the Lego-like apartment building that still looks futuristic today, 43 years after it was a part of Expo ’67, that city’s version of the world’s fair.

Or I would rather pay my way into the Common Ground Country Fair, coming up this very weekend in Unity, Maine, which offers a hopeful take on a healthy and vibrant agricultural present. Forget fried dough and vomit rides; the fair of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association features the Harry S Truman Memorial Manure Toss, barn after barn of livestock, tons of local crafts, an “energy and shelter” exhibition, and, for those so-inclined, two “public policy teach-ins.”

At Vermont Law School, where I work, students are routinely instructed that the Tunbridge World’s Fair is a crucial aspect of any lawyer-in-training’s educational sojourn in the Green Mountain State. That’s true of the farm animals and other agricultural exhibitions that are consigned to the periphery of the fairgrounds. It might even be true of the rest of the fair, which puts Vermont’s ongoing contradictions on vivid display. There’s ample time to discuss them in the traffic jams of up to an hour along the five miles of Route 110 from South Royalton to Tunbridge.

So, by all means, festoon your Prius or your pickup with the bumper sticker announcing the dates of the 2011 Tunbridge World’s Fair. But stop pretending that the gathering is worthy of uncritical acceptance. We deserve better than a vision of Vermont in retrograde.

Don Kreis is an assistant professor of law and the associate director of Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Personal essay: A contrarian view of the Tunbridge World’s Fair.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Photo gallery: Tunbridge World Fair 2010.