It was a perfect autumn day for a fair. The sun shone, skies were blue, the temperature was in the upper 60s and the 40th Annual Riverhead Country Fair drew thousands to stroll, eat, drink and shop in downtown Riverhead.
Hundreds of vendors sold just about everything under the sun.
There were performances on the town showmobile by the Riverhead Faculty and Community Theater and Peconic Ballet Theatre. The country and classic rock band Southbound then took the stage for an afternoon-long concert.
Opening ceremonies were attended by Rep. Lee Zeldin, State Senator Ken LaValle, Town Supervisor Sean Walter, Councilwoman Jodi Giglio and Councilman James Wooten, a Country Fair committee member and emcee of the event.
Walter presented Country Fair chairperson Mary Ellen Ellwood, of Riverhad, with a proclamation thanking her for the huge effort required to coordinate the event.
The Daughters of the American Revolution presented a community service award to Jane Alcorn, of Wading River, publisher of the Sound Observer newspaper and president of the nonprofit Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.
The fair has been a highlight of the three-day Columbus Day weekend for four decades, drawing tens of thousands to the downtown district each year.
The founders of Riverhead Townscape, which was established during the American bicentennial year to beautify downtown Riverhead, decided to reinstitute an annual fair in Riverhead, which had hosted the Suffolk County fair from the 1840s until some time during the Great Depression.
The county fair had been hosted by the Riverhead Agricultural Society on property that came to be known as the fair grounds, just north of Pulaski Street. A good portion of it is now owned by the Riverhead Central School District, which acquired title during the Depression and built the Pulaski Street School — at the time, a new high school — as a project of the Works Project Administration.
After the Depression, the fair was held “only erratically,” according to the late longtime coordinator of the fair, Jim Lull, until a group of residents in 1976 decided to resurrect it.
Lull and his wife Connie became co-chairmen of the Country Fair committee in 1983 — Suffolk County’s 300th anniversary — and continued in that role for the next 27 years.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti
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