Fair Times

            Two hundred and sixty years ago, before the automobile and the American Revolution, King George the Second granted twenty-three thousand and forty acres of land, lying west of the Connecticut River and north of Halifax Township, to the families of “Marlebrough.” Along with the mountains, ponds, and rivers, His Majesty conveyed the privileges and immunities that other towns within the Province of New Hampshire exercised and enjoyed. Town officers should be elected and the annual Town Meeting would be moderated by the King’s Counsel, Timothy Dwight & Associates of Northampton, Massachusetts.  But the first item listed in the originating deed for what is now known as the Town of Marlboro was the privilege of holding a fair.

“As Soon as there Shall be fifty families resident & Settled thereon,” decreed the king,  “Marlebrough Shall have the Liberty of Holding two fairs one of which Shall be held on the Last Monday—in the month of May—and the Other in Last Monday—of the Month of October.” While Monday may not seem like the best choice for fair day, we shouldn’t infer that His Especial and Esteemed Grace didn’t like festivities. Beginning on the last Monday, the fair might continue until the following Saturday. As long as the Church of England was recognized on Sunday, Marlebrough was free to fair it up for the rest of the week. Party whimsy, part Whig, the charter made George’s priorities clear.

            As often happened with charters in those early days, the terms were never fulfilled. According to Ephraim Holland Newton’s The History of Marlborough, Windham County, Vermont, “Indian hostilities” precluded any new settlements. Both the French and English employed native tribes to carry out their colonial plans, making it hard for the settlers to settle. And settle they had to, if they wanted full title to those twenty-three thousand and forty acres of land. For every fifty acres granted, five needed to be under cultivation within five years. (Besides the condition of cultivation, there was the matter of payment: for every hundred acres owned, the settler had to pay 1762 shillings annually for ten years.) With no settlements established, no land was conveyed. The six square miles lying north of Halifax Township and west of the Connecticut River may have had the blessings of an undisturbed ecosystem but not the privileges and immunities recognized by the king.

            Ten years later, in 1761, George II’s grandson renewed and approved the Town Charter. The original grantees had one year to fulfill the conditions, to elect their town officials, to cultivate their crops, to set aside shares for the Town Offices, meetinghouse, town school, and let us not forget the glebe, the share of land reserved for the “benefit of the Church of England.” A lot to do in a year, especially a year without chain saws, backhoes or automobiles, and so perhaps we are not surprised to read in the town history that the surveyors who arrived in 1762 found the hillside in “its natural state where the woodman’s axe was unknown,” part of the “dreary forest” that stretched from Brattleboro to Bennington, “without an opening or a civilized inhabitant.” We can assume that in that first year, there was no fair.

            In the following years, however, the inhabitants of those six square miles of mountains, ponds, and rivers fulfilled the terms of the charter. Forests were felled, hillsides were cultivated, town meetings transpired, and the school and the meetinghouse made visible the privileges and immunities of life in a settled community. No longer part of New Hampshire’s backwater, the residents of Marlboro, Vermont became self-determining citizens, able to moderate their own meetings and to determine the time and place for the fair.

            Nowadays this chartered town has automobiles and backhoes, a few paved roads and liberty to cultivate whichever plot the private landowner chooses. The pine trees no longer belong to His Majesty’s Navy and the forests are filled with openings and inhabitants who would hesitate to call themselves civilized. The liberty to attend whichever church one chooses reduced the Church of England’s hold on the settler’s spirits. And while the townspeople of Marlboro exercise only a fraction of the fair-holding liberty extended by the King, the fact that they exercise it at all tells us something about the importance of this annual event.

            For the last twenty-eight years, on some sibilant Saturday in September, the Town of Marlboro has held a fair. This year, the fair was scheduled for September 10^th.^. After Tropical Storm Irene rearranged the Marlboro landscape, making it difficult for backhoes, let alone automobiles, to get around, it seemed quite likely that the settlers of Marlboro might have something besides the Town Fair on their minds. Who could organize the quilt tent when a flotilla of propane tanks had been seen heading downstream towards the Connecticut River? Who could think about this year’s live raptor exhibit when neighbors were stranded on the Augur Hole?

            Despite the devastation wrought by recent climate hostilities, this coming Saturday the residents of Marlboro are once again festooning the fairgrounds at Muster Field on Ames Hill Road. There will be a craft tent, a tea tent and roasted corn. There will be a Duke of Marlborough contest (in honor of Marlboro’s 250-year anniversary) and representatives from FEMA (in response to Marlboro’s recent climactic event). Citizens of a democracy may not give themselves as much time to festivate as seventeenth-century monarchs would allow, but they haven’t forgotten its primacy in self-rule. Climates might change, roads might wash away, propane tanks might become waterborne, but for towns to stay afloat, the fair must go on.