Marshfield, five days out
MARSHFIELD, Mo. — Webster County Fairgrounds is doing that thing fairgrounds do the week before a crowd: pretending the grass will hold and the parking will make sense.
The Ozarks Homesteading Expo occupies Friday and Saturday, September 4 and 5, at Ellis O. Jackson Park. Organizers have promised more than forty sessions and more than a hundred and fifty vendors. Two-day general admission is about fifty dollars. Children eleven and under are free if someone remembered to get them a ticket, which is the sort of sentence that has ruined more homesteads than blight.
Scoop arrived early, which is to say she arrived in the story before the gates open, and walked the grounds the way a goat walks a new pen: corners first.
If you only buy soap, you have attended a market. If you sit through cheesemaking with your hands still smelling like culture at lunch, you have attended an Expo. Professor Gruff will know which one you did by Thursday.
Saturday’s public list is the one that will empty the coffee urns: opening ceremony before eight, live chicken processing with a plucker giveaway that will start three separate arguments in the bleachers, sheep shearing, homestead cheesemaking, rotational grazing, ancient-grain milling, natural beekeeping. Hogs and dairy cows have been promised their own daylight. Foraging walks will produce at least one person who eats the wrong leaf and one person who pretends not to have.
Local color is already on the square. Whiskey Throttle Farm — Bobbie and Johnny Brooks, registered Nigerian Dwarfs on twenty-one acres, soap two days a week, The Bath Parlor downtown — is the proof that Marshfield did not invent goats for the Expo. The Expo merely rented the town that already knew how.
Scoop’s field notes for readers who insist on leaving the farm:
- Arrive before the heat finds the gravel.
- Cheesemaking before noon.
- Livestock talk after the shade moves.
- Vendor row last, and only after you can name one thing you learned that you cannot put in a tote bag.
Button wanted to enter the plucker drawing. Inkhorn wanted a schedule he could annotate. Nanny Belle Quill wanted to know whether any session would admit that goats are not a personality. Scoop wanted a bench with a view of both the cheese tent and the parking fight.
Five days. Bring water. Bring a pencil. Leave the dog in the truck if the truck is cooler than your optimism.