By KIRBY ROSS
Phillips County Review

KIRWIN — With Phillips County now being in the midst of its 2019 County Fair in Phillipsburg, and Kirwin on its way to celebrating its sesquicentennial in October, it can be noted that the first fair here did not take place in the county seat of Phillipsburg as might be assumed. Instead the county’s first such celebration was held 144 years ago in Kirwin, which at the time was one of the most prominent communities in northwest Kansas.

The Kirwin Fair during the 1870s and 1880s was a huge enterprise, with one particularly successful episode being hailed in the local press as “one long to be remembered in the history of this city.”

Of course that prediction turned out not to be true — should you ask any native of the town about the rousing fairs that were once held there you are likely to receive a quizzical look; go a step further and ask them about an immense fairgrounds formerly in their midst and you will probably be met with downright skepticism.

Rousing those fairs were, though. Acclaimed by an early-day booster as having a “fairgrounds second to none in the state,” thousands of people flocked in from counties throughout the region to attend the festivities, which were held annually between mid-September and mid-October.

Located in the southeast corner of town on 40 acres of land that is now a soybean field in the 21st century, that early-day 19th century Kirwin Fairground boasted a half mile horse race track featuring off-track betting at Kirwin’s Monarch Billiards Hall. The large fairground also had grandstands, floral halls, display halls, stables, and row after row of show pens.

While some of the pens and stables would survive into the 1960s, the display halls, race track and grandstands all were destined to disappear within decades of being built.

The fair was first held in 1875, just a little over a half decade after Kirwin, Phillips County’s oldest town, was founded. One of the largest Indian battles ever fought in Kansas, the three-day Battle of Prairie Dog Creek, had taken place in Phillips County just eight years before the first fair. A mere four years before that fair a siege of Kirwin by 500 Indians had been broken only after the cornered handful of town residents built a breastworks of logs and made a display of their repeating rifles.

Initially a hardscrabble collection of sod houses and cabins made of mud-chinked rough-hewn logs, in 1875 major prosperity descended upon the community when President Ulysses S. Grant named Kirwin to be the site of the U.S. Land Office for the filing of claims that made millions of acres of western Kansas available for pioneer settlement.

With the new land office opening for business on Jan. 9, 1875, almost overnight Kirwin became a major frontier boomtown, setting the stage for a fairground to be constructed and a regional fair to open its gates by September.

Kirwin received yet another major boost in 1879 when the Atchison, Colorado and Pacific Railroad (later renamed Central Branch Union Pacific Railroad and then Missouri Pacific Railroad) laid track that reached Kirwin, opening the fair up to a larger group of attendees, including daytrippers.

The exact same week the first Kirwin Fair got underway in September 1875, not only was Ulysses Grant president, the nation was also still in the midst of Civil War Reconstruction. In addition, that same week George Armstrong Custer was leading an expedition through the Black Hills that within months would culminate in the massacre of his command at the Little Big Horn, Wyatt Earp was a lawman in Wichita, Jesse and Frank James robbed $20,000 from the Huntington Bank, Buffalo Bill was touring North America with one of his early Wild West shows, Billy the Kid was arrested for the first time, Calamity Jane was carrying dispatches for the U.S. Cavalry along the Platte River, Wyoming Territory resident Wild Bill Hickok was soon to move on to his grim fate in Deadwood, Annie Oakley was holding shooting exhibitions across the Midwest, and the great Apache war chief Geronimo was fighting U.S. army troops in the Southwest while Sioux leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were doing the same on the Northern Plains.

It was in the very midst of this rich historical background that the intrepid citizens of Kirwin started their fair.

“The Greatest Enterprise in the Northwest,” as it was billed, was christened not the Phillips County Fair, but instead the Quad County Fair, at first, and then later on the much more grandiose Upper Solomon Valley District Fair as it became more popular and expanded.

Originally marketed towards entrants and attendees from the four corners area of Phillips County, Rooks County, Osborne County, and Smith County, the fair was so successful that it was soon also opened to Mitchell, Jewell, Norton, and Graham county contestants.

General admission for the public could be had for 25 cents, or $1 for a three-day family pass. Prizes were handed out not just for the usual categories of livestock, baked goods, fruit, grain, and vegetables, but also for floral displays, beadwork, embroidery, farm implements, and even collections of fossils and stuffed birds.

The centerpiece and main attraction of the fair, however, was the horse racing, with the initial competition on the fairgrounds racetrack taking place just four months after the first Kentucky Derby was held.

Kirwin Fair horse racing events featured sprinters and trotters, as well as a comedic slow-walking race in which would-be jockeys were give unbroken mounts to ride. With top prizes for the regular exhibits running from 50 cents to $2, the purse for the premier horse race of sprinters was a princely $150.

(According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics the average farm laborer in Kansas earned $20.14 per month in 1875, and that 1875 $150 purse has a 2019 value of $3,492).

One particularly anticipated contest occurring during the 1885 Kirwin Fair involved three nags by the name of Fred H., Minnie, and Ned. According to one colorful post-race report at the time, Ned “the king of the Northwest and the pride of Kirwin,” finally made his appearance guided by the well-experienced hand of Ben Arbuckle, “the prince of Missouri horsemen.”

According to the account, “Ned’s noble carriage, as if holding his competitors in disdain, won the admiration of all and $20 to $5 was offered without any takers. The gong was sounded, the start given, and away dashed the antagonists. But it was no use. The king of the valley, the pet of Kirwin, was unequaled and passed under the wire.”

Adding to the overall festive atmosphere during the three days of celebration was a general revelry not just at the fairgrounds, but also throughout the entire town of Kirwin.

“Drs. Watkins and Shively, the Tooth Extractors and Lightning Liniment Men” set up a booth one year during the fairtime merrymaking and attracted lines of customers with promises of public tooth extractions “without excruciating pain; without lacerating or breaking the jaw-bone.”

And then there was a “Professor Warren,” who offered up harp playing, juggling, and clog dancing.

During the Kirwin Fair oysters were quite popular with the attendees, with fried ones being offered in town at Miller’s Eating Saloon, and canned ones at the Philadelphia Oyster House.

A visitor to the fair could also find specials on fine candies to be had at Miller’s Confectionary, ice cream at Gilbert’s, “cyclone prices” for shoes at the Bee Hive Store, and the “finest line of jewelry in the city” at the Kirwin Jeweler.

For the kids there was a half-mile foot race on the horse track and skating at Fenton’s Roller Rink, while adults had entertainment of a different type — dancing at the Opera House, spirits and ten-pin at the Eagle Saloon, spirits at the Senate Saloon, and more spirits at the Exchange Saloon, Kirwin’s version of a modern-day brewpub since it was the Kirwin Brewery’s local public retail outlet.

Kirwin had a lot of saloons.

With the Logan Silver Cornet Band performing on the fair midway during the day, the Kirwin Silver Cornet Band had to content itself playing in town during the night, as the local newspaper, the Kirwin Chief, was reporting it was banned from the fairgrounds.

Banned? The reason went unstated, but one might wonder whether silver cornet musicians of one era and rock n’ roll guitar musicians of a future era might not have had similar propensities.

With Kirwin having a legal drinking age of just 15-years-old at the time, a large local brewery, horse racing with an off-track betting parlor, a dozen or so saloons and billard halls, a town council committee specifically tasked with regulating gambling and houses of ill fame (this is a whole other story), and a reputation that survived well into the following century — well, the temptations were certainly there.

But still the question is begged — exactly what do musicians have to do to get 86’d from the biggest celebration on the northwest Kansas frontier in the 1870s?

One year it was innocently reported after one of the earliest fairs, a little tongue in cheek perhaps given Kirwin’s wild and woolly repute and the vast number of entertainment venues it had, that while “a few men from other counties were at time intoxicated, the locals made a good accounting of themselves.”

Not so a year or two later when one Frank Dixon of Phillipsburg was found to be raising a ruckus at fair time, hollering that no Kirwin man could best him in a brawl (a common Phillipsburg-Kirwin rivalry practice made repeatedly by others in decades to follow).

Loutish and fully lubricated, Mr. Dixon promptly found himself in tow to the hoosegow after being brought to heel by the Kirwin city marshal on charges of disturbing the peace and using foul language. Houses of ill fame, legal. Foul language, illegal.

On his way to the lockup the prisoner sighted one of the town’s attorneys and requested that he be permitted to discuss retaining his services; accordingly a detour was made and his captor’s grip was loosened so a consultation might take place.

And, almost immediately, say the reports, “the place that knew Dixon knew him no more, and there was nothing to be seen but a long streak of grey overcoat.”

Not to despair though, law and order would yet prevail in Kirwin that balmy autumn night as the miscreant ultimately ended up in the town jail after he was located — discovered not by searching the highways and byways back to Phillipsburg. No — the marshal found Dixon simply by scouting through the town’s night-time business establishments and soon finding him lurking near the rear exit of Snell’s Billiard Hall.

Such was the essence of the briefly famous but soon forgotten Kirwin Upper Solomon Valley District Fair, heralded far and wide in its heyday as being an event that was long to be remembered but instead ended up becoming just another chapter in The Forgotten History of Phillips County.