How your favorite Minnesota State Fair attractions have changed

In the 1880s, when the State Fair settled into its permanent location, modern carnival rides were 50 years away and the area where the Midway now stands was marshland. Undaunted, fair organizers dug a canal and offered Venice-style boat rides — until the early 1910s, when they dug too far and accidentally drained the area. Later, it was used to consolidate all of the fair's sideshows in one place, so that "none need see them unless sufficiently interested," as the 1904 annual report put it. Sideshow exhibits included "freaks" — people with unusual physical characteristics, such as conjoined twins and a guy called "Popeye" who could pop his eyeballs out. At burlesque shows, visitors could watch exotic dancers or, for a few more coins, venture to the back of the tent, where "whatever costume the dancer had would disappear," fair general manager Jerry Hammer said. The Ferris wheel first arrived in 1896. In 1913, one Austin McFadden of Grand Rapids, Mich., proposed building the fair's first roller coaster. He was rejected (surely not out of safety concerns, which barely existed, Hammer said), but got the green light the following year after promising to throw in the "World's Largest Merry-Go-Round," which is the carousel now located in nearby Como Park.

In the fair's earliest years, farm implements were not so much machinery as equipment for horses to pull — wagons, plows and so on. The fair displayed the first mechanical (horse-drawn) grain reaper in 1860, said Hammer. The late 19th century brought steam-powered farm equipment, soon supplanted by machines with gas-fueled internal combustion engines. "The man who misses the machinery exhibit … has visited the fair to little purpose," declared the 1907 annual report, extolling the "cough of the gasoline engine" with its "great traction" and "tremendous power." Machinery Hill hasn't moved, but these days farmers don't go there to shop for large farm equipment (they order it), said fair archivist Keri Huber. There's an exhibit of vintage tractors, but the machines on display are mostly riding lawn mowers.

Since its earliest days, the fair has exhibited fine arts and folksy crafts. They're displayed separately, although in earlier times it might have been hard to tell the difference. Paintings on fungus were a craft, said Huber, but paintings on shovels were art. Flowers made of beads? Craft. Wreaths woven of human hair? Art. Sculpture of the State Capitol made entirely out of onions? Not exactly either, but a prizewinning 1906 display by the St. Paul Growers Association. "We have these artsy bits throughout the fair," Huber said — antecedents of the crop art that came along in 1965. Over the years, the fine art became more sophisticated. For some decades, the exhibits included works by famous artists borrowed from museums. Nowadays the Fine Arts Exhibition is entirely Minnesota-centric — the largest juried art show in the Midwest. Butter sculpting, probably the fair's most famous art/craft, has been around for more than a century. Early sculptures were detailed and realistic life-size renderings of subjects such as children, cows and, one year, President Theodore Roosevelt holding a rifle and standing with a foot atop a freshly felled lion. Those elaborate sculptures were made by applying butter to underlying wire bases — today's Princess Kay of the Milky Way portraits are carved from big, solid blocks of the stuff.

The grandstand has been a fair feature since the very beginning, although the original two-decked wooden structure was replaced in 1909 with the current building (which has since been remodeled). In the early days, about a third of fairgoers went for grandstand shows, said general manager Hammer (these days it's 7 to 8 percent). Attractions could include livestock parades, beauty pageants, fireworks and, later, stunt pilots, auto races and staged trainwrecks. Giant crowds packed the fairgrounds in 1887 to watch a reportedly very realistic re-enactment of a Civil War battle (fresh in the memory then). In 1901, then-Vice President Roosevelt delivered his famous "Speak softly and carry a big stick" speech in the grandstand. But the biggest draw in the early days was horse racing, and its greatest star was the world famous Dan Patch, a pacer horse that broke at least 14 world records. Dan Patch's 1906 world's record for the fastest mile by a harness horse (one minute, 55 seconds) stood unmatched for 32 years. President Harry Truman said that as a boy he wrote a fan letter to the horse.

Most of the big livestock barns of today were built in the 1930s. Before that, show animals were housed in a jumble of small wooden barns. That's not all that has changed. "A hundred years ago, animals were a little bit overweight," said Mark Goodrich, the fair's deputy general manager in charge of competitions. Pigs were literally bred for their fat, back when cooks commonly used lard in pie crusts and other recipes. Animals are slimmer now to accommodate consumers' preference for leaner meat. (If you've ever toured the swine barn and been surprised to see that the hogs, while huge, are not as round and pudgy as you remember from fairy tale illustrations, that's why.) Once, owners of prize livestock could make a living from prize money and breeding rights. Nowadays, artificial insemination and other technological advancements have changed breeding — one bull can father tens of thousands of offspring. "But the champion bull of today makes the breeder just as proud," Goodrich said. Not to mention the animals themselves. "Most animals love coming to the fair," appearing to revel in the extra attention, he said. Later, back on the farm, "the cows prance around like they're better than the cows that stayed home."