For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?
The Neshoba County Fair calls itself Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty, because every year the same families return, antlike, to five hundred and ninety-seven individually owned, festively painted cabins there. For a week at the end of July, even many who live nearby move to the fairgrounds, creating an instant community of twenty thousand people, three times larger than the population of the county seat, Philadelphia.
The first cabins were raw-plank shanties, often made with repurposed materials. Sixty-five of them ultimately faced and surrounded a pavilion, which became known as Founders Square. The governor spoke there in 1896, and every governor is said to have spoken there since. In 1898, the square was seeded with oaks, whose roots spread and surfaced, like keloid scars.
On Fair Saturday, Don DeWeese was on his porch at Cabin 32, a powder-blue two-story with white trim and patriotic bunting. He comes from a prosperous old Neshoba County family and now lives in Memphis. Relatives had travelled from as far away as Texas and North Carolina—they spilled off the porch and into Founders Square. Decades ago, Stanley Dearman, a former editor of the, wrote that fair people “take seriously” the art of “eating and talking.
Cabin 220, the color of a ripe banana, sits just beyond Founders Square, at the entrance to Happy Hollow, the fair’s first “suburb,” a short stretch of cabins separated by a sawdust-covered footpath. When I came across it, the owners, William and Barbie Bassett, and their daughter, Gracie, were sitting, where else, on the porch. Barbie, a former television meteorologist, had written “92°” on a whiteboard—the daily Faircast.
Cabin people, traditionally, are hospitality extremists. At the fair, I was offered water, lemonade, iced tea, beer, Gatorade, a souvenir apron, boiled shrimp, homemade ice cream, a pork chop, a taco, a bed, a toilet, the remains of a funnel cake, a book about doughnuts, an introduction to “some really obnoxious cousins,” two ibuprofens, two more ibuprofens, help “fixing” a traffic ticket , and numerous iterations of chicken.
The fair has been called “the Carnegie Hall of stump speaking” and “Republican Woodstock.” Candidates address fairgoers in short bursts, three mornings in a row. In November, Mississippi will hold a gubernatorial election; Brandon Presley, a Democrat and Elvis’s second cousin, who is a state public-service commissioner, has mounted a surprisingly strong campaign against the Republican incumbent, Tate Reeves. At the fair, the more urgent race was the Republican primary for lieutenant governor.
Later on the day of his speech, McDaniel somehow wound up in Cabin 22, on Founders Square, perhaps unaware that one of the families that own it, the Molpuses, are prominent Democrats. A Molpus relative delivered this news politely; McDaniel left. In 2016, when Donald Trump, Jr., appeared at the fair as a surrogate for his father, a woman goose-stepped in Founders Square. Democrats, vastly outnumbered, are relegated to such small acts of resistance.
Seventy-four cabins front the red clay horse track. During the races, quarter and dollar bettors crowd the balconies and porches. One afternoon, I stopped by the fair’s stables to see Walter Miller, a racing champion who had just come off the track and was cooling down two of his horses, American Sportsman and Fusion Five. Miller, who is in his sixties, had owned a trail-riding business in coastal Mississippi until a friend advised him to upgrade to harness racing, a sport that makes use of what are essentially chariots.
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