The 48th annual Oregon Country Fair begins Friday west of Eugene near Veneta. The event’s staff and volunteers have been hard at work to prepare the site for the 45,000 visitors expected over three days.
All week long the Oregon Country Fair crew has been reassembling booths, sprucing up living willow statues and laying fir shavings to keep dust down at this weekend’s extravaganza. According to Fair co-manager Shane Harvey, only months ago the site would have unrecognizable.
"The fair site, where all the booths are, lies in a flood plain and every year we have floods,” says Harvey. “This year we had an exceptional amount of snow and rain – not snow here on the fair site but snow on the mountains and in the coast range. With all the rain we flooded a total of eight times and five of the floods were very major. You could canoe the site.”
Many of the fair booths have been standing for 40 plus years, despite yearly floods. Booth owners in the flood zones often remove the lower halves of their booths during the off season to let waters flow through.