Hopkinton State Fair Livestock Show: Show Parents Go Full Granite State
Contoocook Show Parents Commission Engraved Granite Tack Boxes, Discover Why Nobody in New Hampshire Moves Anything Quickly
CONTOOCOOK, New Hampshire — The Hopkinton State Fair Livestock Show has always drawn a certain amount of hardware, but fair volunteers say this year was the first time a show family arrived with a tack box that required a crane, a structural engineer and a written apology to the gate on Kearsarge Avenue. The box was granite. It weighed 2,140 pounds empty and held one comb, two show halters, a can of fly spray and a sandwich. It was engraved on all four sides with the name of a 106-pound Hampshire market lamb called Lord Wentworth, in a serif font the stonecutter described as “more than the lamb needed.” “We’re the Granite State,” said the father who ordered it, leaning against it, because it was the only thing in the sheep barn guaranteed not to move. “Everybody else shows up with plastic. Plastic says you might not be back next year.”How a $14 Plastic Tote Started the Granite Arms Race
The trouble began in the spring, when a Monadnock region family arrived at a tagging date with their lamb’s supplies in a $14 plastic tote. Nobody noticed the tote. Everybody noticed the next family’s show box, built of cherry from their own woodlot, with the 4-H clover burned into the lid. By June a goat family had answered in slate. By July the swine barn had gone to soapstone, on the grounds that it “holds the cold.” In August the Wentworth family called a granite shed in the hills, where the foreman asked what the box was for, was told, and asked again. The invoice, which the father keeps laminated in the lid, reads in part:- Engraved granite tack box, polished, lid hinged on bronze: $11,400
- Matching granite feed scoop, “which does not scoop”: $640
- Granite pen nameplate, 340 pounds: $2,900
- Flatbed, crane and rigging crew, one way: $3,850
- Survey of the sheep barn floor by a licensed engineer: $1,200
- One market lamb: $275
The Mothers Escalate to Monuments
Permanence turned out to be contagious. A mother in the goat barn commissioned a granite bust of her son’s Boer wether, Calvin, explaining that New Hampshire “has been one granite face short since 2003” and that somebody ought to step up. From the right it resembled a retired dentist. Calvin ate the tag off its pedestal. A rabbit family installed a granite mounting step for a nine-pound doe who has never needed help getting onto anything. A beef family set a granite hay rack outside their steer’s stall, three feet long and engraved with a quotation about perseverance. The rack, as it happens, holds the state’s most valuable crop. According to the USDA’s New Hampshire agriculture overview, hay is the top commodity in New Hampshire at about $11.55 million a year, ahead of maple syrup. The rack was worth more than the hay in it by a figure the family declined to share, and the steer ate the hay without reading the quotation. The swine family’s granite water trough was the only investment to return a measurable benefit. Their market hog lay down in it on Friday and refused to leave until Sunday. The family now refers to it as “the plunge.”Fair Officials Consult the 1915 Ledger
By Saturday the volunteers were looking for a rule. The fair’s own history of the Hopkinton State Fair records that the first fair, put on in 1915 by the Contoocook Board of Trade at George’s Park, made a net profit of just under five dollars. One volunteer noted that the founders’ entire profit would not have covered the engraving on a single serif. “There is nothing in a hundred and eleven years about granite,” he told Farm.FM. “In 1915 people carried their combs in their pockets.” A volunteer from the Morrill Family Farm Museum asked whether the boxes should now be catalogued as exhibits, since anything that stays put long enough eventually becomes history.What the Judge Saw at the Hopkinton State Fair Livestock Show
The market lamb class went into the ring on Labor Day morning. The judge walked past six tons of carved stone and looked at none of it. He looked at lambs. Lord Wentworth’s exhibitor, a 13-year-old, showed him beautifully. She had not opened the granite box since Thursday, because the lid weighs 180 pounds, so she carried her comb in her back pocket, exactly as the Board of Trade intended. Her lamb set up square on the first try and stayed there. The class went to the Monadnock family’s daughter, whose $14 tote sat in the aisle all week. In his remarks the judge praised the winner’s balance, her patience, and “how easily he moves.” Several parents in the stands took the last part personally.
The Pulling Ring Settles It
On Monday evening, as the fair closed, the boxes did not. The crane had been booked for another job in Concord. The flatbed rental had expired at noon. The engineer’s survey covered getting the granite in, not out. The 4-H members solved it before supper. Three of them walked over to the pulling competitions, where a teamster was loading a yoke of oxen who had watched the barn all weekend with “professional interest.” Pulling animals are trained to drag dead weight. The kids pointed out that the barn was full of it. The price was two bales of hay. The oxen dragged the Wentworth box out of the sheep barn on a stone boat in under a minute, then the bust, then the nameplate, then the hay rack. The teamster called it their best workout of the year and asked to keep the granite as permanent pulling weight. The parents, who had seen the crane quote, said yes before he finished the question. The Hopkinton State Fair Livestock Show returns in September 2027. The granite is staying in the pulling ring, finally being used for something. The exhibitors are bringing their supplies in plastic totes. The hog has asked about the trough.Five Humorous Observations About New Hampshire 4-H and FFA Livestock Shows
- A family spent $20,265 on stone to show a $275 lamb, and the only thing in the barn that needed a structural engineer was the parents.
- Hay is the most valuable crop in New Hampshire and it got served out of a monument. The steer still ate it the regular way.
- The first Hopkinton fair cleared under five dollars. One engraved serif would have bankrupted it, and the founders would have been right to say so.
- A 13-year-old kept her comb in her pocket for four days because the lid was too heavy. That is not a grooming tip. That is a review of the box.
- The oxen moved six tons of parental ambition for two bales of hay. It is the best hourly rate anybody earned all weekend, and they did not even ask for the trough.