Fair: A slice of Valley life

The News Virginian
Published: August 5, 2008

Tradition runs as deep as the Valley in communities nestled in the shadows of the Blue Ridge. The annual Augusta County Fair that began Tuesday is an example. For perspective, consider John Tyler Sr., father of the 10th president of the United States. The elder Tyler was Virginia governor in 1811, when organizers founded the Augusta Agricultural Society and began planning a county fair.
Among the early attractions, according to the fair Web site: homemade butter, soap and lard, gooseberry wine and hair mattresses. For five years starting in 1949 the county fair also was the official State Fair. During the 1950s and 1960s, the event featured horse racing, among sundry attractions of vintage Southern nature.
Investors bought the fair’s assets in 1970 and renamed the event, the Greater Shenandoah Valley Agricultural Fair, which still is held annually at Eastside Speedway in Dooms. That fair, which is agricultural largely in name only, is the direct descendent of the original. The more literal incarnation is the event at Augusta Expoland that runs through the weekend. It was started almost 40 years ago by the Ruritan Club and agricultural leaders and reorganized in 1993.
Many elements of life in our section of the Shenandoah Valley contribute to the sense of place that separate this region from others in these United States. The county fair is considerable among those elements — a unique slice of an America largely lost to modernity, an event that draws together neighbors and pulls adults and children alike to a kind of fun that cannot be had in virtual realms.
The News Virginian is pleased to be a sponsor of the festivities. Join us there for an experience in the abiding Virginia of Tyler and the Valley of today and tomorrow.

A warrior in prose

The communist tyranny finally conquered by presidents Reagan and Bush two decades ago was recognized long before by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer whose works chronicled totalitarianism in an era when the risks were extraordinary.
Reagan sensed that Soviet power could be sapped in a weapons buildup that only America could win, and so pushed the empire to the brink and then over it. Solzhenitsyn sensed that prose and truth carried a power that weapons and oppression could not match, and pushed communism’s darkness into the light.
He spent eight years in prison camps for slighting Stalin, but persisted in confrontation, penning “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago,” which earned him exile. In the United States, Solzhenitsyn turned his insights on Western decadence, a theme that won him new enemies beyond Soviet borders. Humanity is starved for such voices, those unafraid despite knowing that “truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter,” but believe with Fyodor Dostoevsky that “beauty will save the world.”
Solzhenitsyn’s death Sunday reminds us how desperate the need for others convicted, capable and willing to so speak, irregardless of the penalties while confident in rewards frequently unseen.