Ohio State Fair

Smokey's house

sbradford — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 17:45:20 +0000

Smokey's house

July 1, 2025

The Natural Resources Park at the southeast corner of the Ohio Exposition Center (also known as the state fairgrounds) is an 8-acre oasis in what is otherwise a vast sea of concrete.

If you’re planning to attend the Ohio State Fair, July 23 to August 3, you really should stop by. And if you have young children in tow, the 15-foot-tall animatronic Smokey Bear is sure to be a hit. The very bright bruin somehow mysteriously knows the identity of the boys and girls strolling past with their parents and greets the kids by name.

Smokey, of course, is best known as the star of the longest-running public service announcement campaign in American history, cautioning people since 1947 on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service to “remember ... only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

That’s why it’s appropriate that standing behind the giant Smokey at the state fairgrounds is a second icon of Ohio forest management history: the 60-foot Armintrout Fire Tower.

At least 48 fire towers once stood on state, federal, and private lands across the Buckeye State — 39 of which were operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry. The first, Copperhead Fire Tower, was erected at Shawnee State Forest in 1924. The last one in use, Green Ridge at Pike State Forest, closed 56 years later in 1978 as aircraft became more commonly used for wildfire detection.

The retired Armintrout tower was relocated from Pike County to the state fairgrounds in 2016.

Fire towers are memorable not only for the important purpose they once served, but also for the people they attracted to staff them as lookouts. Years ago, the outdoors humorist Patrick McManus wrote an article for Sports Illustrated titled “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” in which he described the types of people who applied for the federal jobs.

“The experience of the Forest Service suggests that no particular kind of individual is ideally suited to life in a tower suite, and the recruits who show up for training early each summer prove to be a strangely mixed lot: prim lady schoolteachers, college professors, ministers’ wives, loggers, vacationing businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, coeds, honeymooners, old marrieds, beauty queens, students, female truck drivers, ex-marines, and cookie-baking housewives; in short, just about anyone who can shake off the fetters of routine life for three months.”

The candidates also may or may not have possessed much experience or knowledge about the outdoors. For instance, McManus related the story of one fire tower lookout who nervously radioed his supervisor that “big, hairy beasts are ganging up around the foot of my tower.” Going outside for another check, the lookout quickly ran back to the radio yelling, “Now they’re coming up the stairs!” Fearing the worst, the supervisor jumped in his pickup truck and raced to the fire tower, only to find a family of pack rats playing on the lower levels of the stairway.

But there were legitimate dangers. Fire towers were equipped with lightning rods, yet could still be hit by lightning, producing an effect much like sitting inside an exploding bomb. “Rangers consider the first lightning storm as the qualifying exam for their new lookouts,” McManus wrote. “Up to then, they’re amateurs. After it, they’re pros.”

One particular lookout qualified as a pro during his first night on the job, his tower being struck by lightning nine times! McManus wrote, “Asked if he would like a few days off to pull himself together, the lookout said no, he would stick to his post — an obvious case of shell shock.”

Still standing

In addition to the Armintrout Fire Tower at the state fairgrounds, nine others remain in the state; seven are owned by the ODNR Division of Forestry and two are owned by the U.S. Forest Service:

Ash Cave: Hocking Hills State Forest
Atkinson Ridge: Zaleski State Forest
Blue Rock: Blue Rock State Forest
Brush Ridge: Tar Hollow State Forest
Copperhead: Shawnee State Forest
Mohican: Mohican-Memorial State Forest
Scioto Trail: Scioto Trail State Forest
Snake Ridge: Wayne National Forest Headquarters, Nelsonville
Shawnee Lookout: Hocking County

Repeat? Why not!

hgraffice — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:53:32 +0000

Repeat? Why not!

August 2, 2019

Celeste Baumgartner

Features

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude and want determine how well you do.” Those words, adorning a motivational sign in the Butterfield family’s barn near Oxford, Ohio, have been undeniably effective.

Matt Butterfield’s 280-pound market barrow, named “Repeat,” was grand champion at the 2018 Ohio State Fair. The pig was so named because Butterfield’s previous pig, “Hollywood,” was grand champion at the 2017 fair. It was only the second time that someone had won back-to-back Ohio State Fair grand championships with pigs.

Showing at the Butler County and Ohio State fairs is a family affair for the Butterfields, who are members of Butler Rural Electric Cooperative. Nicole and Mark Butterfield, their son, Matt, and daughter, Lauren, are all involved in the kids’ 4-H projects.

In 2017, after Matt won the first championship, the family joked that maybe he would win a second. His grandmother, Patricia Butterfield, suggested naming one of the pigs Repeat, just in case. They pinned the name on the one for which they had the highest hopes and were rewarded for their optimism with win number two. The same conversation came up again this year, and Grandma Butterfield said, “We don’t want a ‘Three-Peat.’ But how about ‘Why Not?’” The name stuck.

Matt won’t make too much of the name before the competition because he doesn’t want to be overconfident. He likes winning, but even more, he likes the hard work and the fun of preparing for the fair and the fact that the whole family is involved. But will he try for another win?

“Anybody would want to,” he says. “We have fun with it. It’s a family thing. It teaches you a lot, and your family is together, so that’s what matters most to me about it.”

Mark and Matt bought Hollywood and Repeat from Moyer Show Pigs. Though the pigs had different sires, they had several similarities. This year, the Butterfields bought seven pigs from Moyer, a few more than usual. Matt graduated from Talawanda High School last spring, so this is his last year as a part of 4-H. Lauren is also going to show pigs and sheep this year.

The Butterfields look for structure when they select their pigs. “There’s one that looks nice to us,” Matt says. “I walk all of them a couple of times, and he looks the best. He walks square; he’s got a good structure on his body; he has a lot of muscle, and when he puts his head up, it emphasizes how his body looks. He looks close to what the past two (Hollywood and Repeat) were.”

Besides hard work and fun, doing well at the fair involves a lot of planning. Matt and Lauren’s dad, Mark, is the expert on feed, Matt says. Mark helps his kids decide what their animal’s final target weight should be. They want the animal to grow at a certain rate of gain, Mark says, because growing too fast causes structural issues. The Butterfields adjust the protein, fat, and lysine levels in the feed, relative to how the barrow is developing.

“At the beginning, when we buy them in March, we weigh them every week. We’re adjusting the feed every three weeks maybe,” Mark says. “Once we get close to the fair, we’re adjusting the feed maybe every two to three days. We chart them and graph their average daily gain. Starting in late June, we weigh them every day. We monitor their growth rate, their rate of gain, and compare that to what we’re targeting.”

Matt has an added challenge this year, beyond the target weight. Lauren, a couple of years younger than him, has won five grand championships at the Butler County Fair, most for showing sheep. This year she’ll be showing barrows at the Ohio State Fair — competing against Matt.

Whatever the outcome, Matt is already moving into his next phase. He’ll attend the University of Northern Ohio, studying diesel technology and agribusiness, in the fall. He’s farming 361 acres of his own this year with a goal of turning that into 2,000 acres someday. He’s got the motivation to do it.

Moo-ving experience: Ohio State Fair's Butter Sculptures

hgraffice — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:47:46 +0000

Moo-ving experience: Ohio State Fair's Butter Sculptures

August 2, 2019

Margie Wuebker

Features

The five sculptors know how important their role is. Within their capable hands is a tradition that some will experience for the first time this year and others perhaps the fiftieth time — one that thousands of people look forward to every year.

“The butter sculpture display is one of the most loved traditions of the Ohio State Fair,” says Jenny Hubble, senior vice president of communications for the American Dairy Association Mideast, which represents dairy farmers in Ohio and West Virginia. “Ohio’s dairy farmers are proud to support it.”

The tradition began in 1903, when Ohio State University and dairy processors in the Buckeye State sponsored butter-sculpting contests at the fair.

T. Shelton and Company, distributor of Sunbury Cooperative Creamery Butter, is credited with turning in the first butter cow and calf.

Additional themes have been added in ensuing years. The American Dairy Association Mideast picks something that is nonpolitical and noncontroversial, optimistic, and with broad audience appeal.

The five-member technical sculptor team includes lead sculptors Paul Brooke and Alex Balz of Cincinnati, Tammy Buerk of West Chester, Erin Swearingen of Columbus, and Matt Davidson, a Sidney dairy farmer. The mural in the display is painted by Cincinnati-based artist Ted Hendricks.

Brooke and Balz spend a week planning the display and building the wood and steel frames or armatures to support the butter’s weight. The team spends 400 hours sculpting in Columbus, roughly a week before the fair opens. They go through nearly 2,200 pounds of butter in the process.

The beloved butter cow and calf are always part of the display. Other butter sculptures have honored astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Ohio’s top sports teams.

The sculptors slice the butter, which comes in 55-pound blocks, into manageable loaves and layer it onto support frames. They wear gloves and multiple layers of clothing while they work in a large, 46-degree cooler.

“It hardens on the frames like a stick of butter straight out of the refrigerator,” Brooke says. “At that point, it’s like working with clay, although we really have to exaggerate the detail because butter tends to be more translucent and doesn’t reflect light like other materials.”

There is no waste — the butter used in the process is already past its expiration date, and once the fair is over, it’s recycled and refined into an ingredient used for animal feed, tires, and cosmetics, among other things.