Before you read another sentence of this story, take out your phone and call up YouTube.
Type “WM Battelle District Fair 1939,1940,1941” into the search field.
Then, watch as the time-capsule magic unspools.
“I don’t know how they got that footage,” David Cottrell said, “but it’s a real treasure.”
And, he said, it shows what all the fuss is about regarding one of the oldest district fairs in the state of West Virginia — and definitely the oldest in Monongalia County.
Cottrell, the principal of Clay-Battelle High School, is also on the board of directors of the Battelle District Fair, the 2022 edition of which launches today and runs this week in Wadestown.
This is the 93rd year for the fair, which has been part of Mon’s proceedings since 1923.
If the math doesn’t sound quite right — that’s because it isn’t.
You can thank a world war and a world pandemic for that.
The fair went dark for three years at the height of the fighting in War II. Concerns over COVID again shut down the midway in 2020.
“Other than that, we’ve been here,” Cottrell said, “and we’re going to keep being here.”
That included 2017, when torrential rains flooded the fairgrounds, he said.
“Yeah, that was our ‘Good-Lord-willing-and-the-creek-don’t-rise’ edition,” Cottrell said, only a little ruefully. “But we still pulled it off.”
“Life is Sweeter at the Battelle District Fair,” is the theme of this year’s fair, he said, and he fully expects for it to live up to the advance billing.
Look for all the traditional fair favorites, he said, such as the Ferris wheel and funnel cakes.
Don’t forget the Best Quilt contest and the greased pig race, he said — of which he has a personal history.
We’ll get to that.
A horseshoe-pitching tournament and cake walk are also on the bill, along with concerts by Nashville stars Josh Gracin and Jason Michael Carroll — both of whom have a delegation of fans from neighboring states already committed to coming in.
“You can’t go wrong with country music performers and their fans,” Cottrell said.
“We were contacted by a group of people from New York state who are going to pay us a visit for Jason Michael Carroll,” he said. “That’s nice. This is just down-home, old-fashioned fun.”
He says the latter without one iota of irony.
That’s because today’s times are more than uncertain, he said.
This fall when school starts, he’ll be back in his role as Clay-Battelle principal — and his students will be passing through high-tech weapons detectors for the first time ever, on their way to class.
Cottrell grew up going to the Battelle fair. He’s a western Monongalia native and a graduate of Clay-Battelle, also the alma mater of his mom and dad, who were high school sweethearts, in fact.
They helped organize and worked the fair, also, and one of their son’s milestone moments was the year he was finally deemed old enough to roam the midway without parental supervision.
“I still had to check in with them, though,” he said. “But it was always good seeing everybody. Back then, you didn’t have social media. You had the fair.”
Sepia-tone time machine
These days, you have the fair and social media, in that order.
You can visit the Facebook page of the Battelle District for the complete rundown of the coming week’s activities, with all pageantry of the contestants for queen and all the fun of everything else.
Do that after you call up YouTube, Cottrell said.
The aforementioned footage from 1939-41 is from the West Virginia Archives and History Collection, and it shows the fair — when the fair was truly the Big Dog of its day, Cottrell said.
“That’s when there was a high school game in the middle of everything,” he said. “That’s when all the high school marching bands performed.”
Watching with his fellow directors, he said, made for some misty eyes. Couldn’t help it.
“There were great-great-grandparents shown when they were kids,” he said. “Those people are no longer with us.”
There were once-and-future soldiers, he said, ready to go off and fight for their country in places they never heard of. Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened yet.
Everyone in that footage is likely gone now, he said, but their memories remain, precisely because of it.
And that’s precisely why the fair always digs deep in the well to hearken back, Cottrell said, even as it continues to embrace Facebook and other ways of getting the word out that were the stuff of Buck Rogers serials in 1939.
That’s precisely why … there’s a greased pig contest.
Speaking of which: Will a certain high school principal be chasing a certain slicked-up porcine this year?
Cottrell laughed.
“The last time a certain high school principal tried that at the fair, he was sore for a week.”
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