What happens to a 130-year-old town tradition when the organization that has run it for two decades runs out of people to run it?
In January 2024, South Windsor got an answer nobody wanted. The South Windsor Jaycees Foundation posted on Facebook that it was closing its local chapter, and with it, two of the town's longest-running events, the Wapping Fair and Paws in the Park, were done. Membership had been declining since COVID, and the volunteers who used to staff the fair each September simply hadn't come back in enough numbers to keep it running. For a town where the fair has been a fixture since 1892, that felt permanent. It wasn't. This September, the Wapping Fair returns to the John J. Mitchell Fairgrounds for four days, September 10 through 13, 2026. But the version you'll walk into this year isn't a resurrected version of the old fair. It's a different operation wearing the same name, and if you know where to look, the schedule tells you exactly how.
A fair that outgrew four different locations before this one
The Wapping Fair started in 1890 as a small showcase of the Wapping farming community's agricultural work, formalized into an annual event in 1892 to help fund the Wapping District School. It went dark for years, then came back in 1945 to mark South Windsor's centennial. By 1952 it had outgrown its original home and moved to Hall Grove. In the mid-1960s it moved again, to Wapping Elementary School, then to Zagorski Park once the high school started using the Wapping School as an annex. The Wapping Grange, which had managed it alone for decades, eventually needed help and brought in the South Windsor Jaycees. For a two-year stretch in the early 1970s it partnered with the Knights of Columbus. Since 2017, it's been held at its current site on Brookfield Street, the fairgrounds now known as the John J. Mitchell Fairgrounds, formally part of Rye Street Park.
The Jaycees took over full organization of the fair in 2001 and full management in 2012. That's the arrangement most current South Windsor residents grew up with: a standing civic organization, dues-paying members, an institutional structure behind the rides and livestock tents. That's also the arrangement that collapsed in January 2024, when the Jaycees Foundation announced its closure after more than 130 years of the fair's existence.
One resident decided that wasn't the end of the story
The revival didn't come from a nonprofit board or a town department. It came from David Prior, a South Windsor resident who, within weeks of the Jaycees' announcement, started reaching out to neighbors and pulling together a group that called itself Friends of the Wapping Fair. Prior's goal was specific: get the fair running at full strength in time for what would be its 132nd year, over the weekend of September 5, 2024.
"I want everyone to know, the Wapping Fair is back."
That's what Prior told South Windsor High School's student newspaper, The Bobcat Prowl, in the early days of the effort. It's worth sitting with how uncertain that effort actually was. The same reporting noted that Friends of the Wapping Fair was still short on volunteers, still recruiting vendors and sponsors from scratch, and dealing with a publicity problem so real that many South Windsor residents believed the fair was permanently gone even as the group worked to bring it back.
The volunteer model shows up in the details, not just the headline
This is the part that's easy to miss if you only skim the dates and admission prices. A fair backed by an institution with dues-paying membership doesn't need to invent new revenue and labor mechanisms on the fly. A fair rebuilt by a volunteer group with no dues structure does, and last year's fair, its 133rd, shows exactly how.
Friends of the Wapping Fair extended volunteer opportunities directly to South Windsor High School students, framing fair shifts as a way to earn community service hours. That's a labor solution for an organization that no longer has an institutional bench to draw from. The 2025 fair also introduced a new mascot, a pig, and turned the naming of it into a community contest run through Facebook, the kind of low-cost engagement tactic a lean, volunteer-run event leans on instead of a marketing budget. On the funding side, the 2025 fair offered half-price admission on Thursday to anyone bringing a canned or non-perishable food item, with the proceeds supporting the South Windsor Food Bank, and free Sunday admission for veterans, first responders, and active-duty military, underwritten by a donation from the Hartford Evergreen Masonic Lodge #88. That last detail matters more than it looks. A fair with a standing civic sponsor behind it doesn't typically need a separate local Masonic lodge to fund a single day of free admission. A fair rebuilt from volunteers, one sponsorship at a time, does.
None of this is a knock on how the fair runs now. It's the opposite. It's evidence that the thing keeping the Wapping Fair alive in 2026 isn't a standing organization with dues and a budget line. It's a rotating cast of neighbors, a high school's worth of student volunteers, a food bank partnership, and a Masonic lodge picking up a line item. That's a fundamentally different kind of institution than the one that ran the fair for the previous two decades, even though the rides, the livestock tents, and the fried dough look exactly the same.
What's actually on the calendar this year
The 2026 fair, which will be the 134th by the event's own count, runs four days at the John J. Mitchell Fairgrounds, 75 Brookfield Street.
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Thursday, Sept. 10 | 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. |
| Friday, Sept. 11 | 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. |
| Saturday, Sept. 12 | 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. |
| Sunday, Sept. 13 | 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
Admission runs $20 for general admission with unlimited midway rides, $7 for seniors 65 and older without rides, and $14 for seniors who want the ride wristband included. Children under 36 inches get into the fairground for free, though safety rules keep them off the midway rides. Confirm current details and vendor lineups directly through the Wapping Fair's official site, since specifics like the food truck roster and merchant tent list are still being finalized ahead of the gates opening.
Why this is worth knowing if you've lived here through the switch
If you moved to South Windsor recently, none of this history is visible from the fairgrounds gate. The fair looks like exactly what it's always been: a district-level agricultural fair under the Connecticut Association of Fairs, with livestock exhibits, a midway, live music, and a baking contest shared with the state association. But if you've lived here long enough to remember the fair before 2024, or you were one of the residents who assumed it was gone for good, the operational shift underneath it is the actual story. The Wapping Fair surviving isn't a given anymore the way it once was under a standing civic organization. It survives now because a specific set of neighbors decided it should, and because a high school's volunteer hours, a food bank partnership, and a Masonic lodge's Sunday sponsorship are doing work that an institutional membership base used to do quietly in the background.
That's worth knowing whether or not you go this year. It's also worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who ends up fielding a "wait, is that thing still happening?" question from a neighbor sometime around Labor Day. Now you have the actual answer, not just the dates.
South Windsor's calendar is full of these small, specific rhythms that don't show up on any town website, and tracking them is part of understanding what it actually feels like to live here day to day, not just what the listing photos show. If you're weighing a move within South Windsor, curious what your current home might be worth in today's local market, or just want a straight read on where things stand, Brian Burke is a phone call away. Request a free home valuation or talk about your move whenever you're ready.
