Carnival rides are coming back to the Northern Maine Fairgrounds in September.
The fair association and Presque Isle’s Downtown Revitalization Committee have teamed up for Crisp Nights and Carnival Lights, slated Sept. 11 to 14.
Along with Smokey’s Greater Shows, the new four-day event will include concerts, tractor pulling, children’s activities and more. Organizers want to ring in the harvest season and give the community a last late-summer hurrah before the colder weather comes.
But even more than that, they hope to attract a crowd that’s been clamoring for a midway for six years.
“It’ll bring a group of people that maybe didn’t come to our agricultural fair. They were looking for rides,” Fair Association Past President Lynwood Winslow said. “We want to try to do something to make up for the fact that we haven’t been able to get rides during our fair week.”
The Northern Maine Agricultural Fair last had a midway in 2019. Then, as with so many other aspects of life, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into things. Carnival companies across Maine and nationwide shrank, Winslow said. And those that survived increasingly gravitated toward places with the most people.
Rural Aroostook County couldn’t compete with larger places such as Bangor, where the Bangor State Fair runs concurrently with Presque Isle’s, he said.
It isn’t that carnival companies won’t come to Aroostook County. They just can’t come during the busy summer fair season, Winslow said. And the local fair’s mission has always been to promote agriculture and family fun.
It’s a formula that, carnival or not, has kept the fairgrounds going for more than 170 years. Except for a few years during wartimes and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the fair has been held continuously since its first exhibition in October 1851.
This year’s fair, held July 31 to Aug. 3, drew large crowds, Fair President Kent Forbes said. People were enthusiastic, volunteers made things run smoothly and the weather cooperated all four days. A total of 7,700 came through the gates, eclipsing last year’s figure of 6,200.
Still, many people don’t understand that the association has to apply for its annual dates, he said. The Maine Association of Agricultural Fairs sets times three or four years ahead for each of the state’s 25 fairs. That’s why they had to set a date after Labor Day to bring a midway back.
“We are an agricultural fair first. For 170 years we’ve been an agricultural fair,” he said. “We have to have our fair when the state says we have it. But Crisp Nights and Carnival Lights is extra. It’s just one more opportunity for people to get on the fairgrounds.”
It’s important that any fair-related event cater to children, Forbes said. So the fair association will provide several small, coin-operated-style attractions for kids who are too young to board the midway’s kiddie or adult attractions.
The event fell into place through a series of happy accidents, Fair Vice President Shawn Bugbee said.
In January, local directors attended the Maine Association of Agricultural Fairs’ annual meeting in Portland. They asked representatives of Smokey’s Greater Shows what they could do to bring them north, he said. The answer was: have an event outside of the busy summer fair season.
Meanwhile, the Downtown Revitalization Committee had asked fair officials to use the fairgrounds for a couple of concerts in September, Bugbee said. So they all put their heads together to plan the four-day festival.
But it needed a name, so the association held a contest that garnered about 250 entries, Fair Director Melissa Carney said. Winner Carrie Skonieczny Winslow dubbed it Crisp Nights and Carnival Lights.
Things will kick off on Thursday, Sept. 11, with “dollar night” admission, and kids under 5 will get in free, Carney said.
Besides the carnival, events will include bingo presented by the fair association, a vendor and crafter village, the Li’l Lumberjacks attraction for kids, mini-modified and garden tractor pulling, a demolition derby and poker tournament, she said.
Local band French Toast will perform at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13, and ’80s rock band Deadly Desire from Nobleboro will take the stage at 7 p.m. A beer garden will be available.
From Friday through Sunday, admission is $10 for adults and $5 for children.
For details and a full schedule, visit the fair’s website or find the Northern Maine Fair Association on Facebook.
It’s too soon to tell if the fall event will become a regular happening, but the association hopes the community will support it.
“I would hope people would come give us another look, because the people here are really working hard and doing a good job, and we want to have what people want,” Winslow said.
