LUMBERTON — The Robeson Regional Agricultural Fair and strong weather have a long history beginning with the first fair and continued by the most recent fair.

As the 2022 Robeson Regional Agricultural Fair winds down, now is the time to look back across the yawning chasm of time to the distant past, when the fair’s story began. It is told on the fair website, related by Everett Davis because he wanted to keep up with history, and told again here in this penultimate installment of a series on important and interesting aspects of the Agricultural Fair.

It was Oct 1947, the immediate post World War II period. In the newspapers of the time, pieces on jobs for disabled veterans shared pages with film advertisements. Much like the present, significant tragedy in the recent past still lingered, and with the world moving from the World Wars to the Cold War era, tumult was to continue in a different form.

But there will always be looming, monolithic things casting their dark shadows on every life, and people need smaller, more immediate things to provide solace and a sense of community solidarity, a place to bond over food and drink, or simply a place to see a chick

In Lumbterton returned veterans had founded the Lumberton Jaycees a year prior. The Jaycees were a youth organization and members’ ages were bracketed at 21 and 36, as stated by Coble Wilson, himself a former member.

They founded the fair with the 1st Annual Robeson County Farmers Festival. Davis’ account tells nearly 1500 attenedees visited this first fair, with tickets for a dollar. The 1st Annual Robeson County Farmers Festival only ran for a single day. The festivities were not suspended despite the heavy rainfall, though some events were moved inside a warehouse. The 2022 fair was postponed on its openining day, persisted through power issues, and cleaned up and repaired to be open and ready for the people of Robeson County.