For 75 years, the Milan Community Fair has provided a kick-off to the summer for young and old alike.

By Doug Gilson

From the Opening Day Parade to the Free Kids Day events on the Last day of the festival, it continued to bring folks together. One of Milan’s Oldest long-standing events, a small-town taste of Americana, a community gathering that has continued for decades with many ups and downs, changes, challenges, and even a national pandemic, it has survived.

The Fair started over 75 years ago when many of Milan’s non-profit groups came together to start what has become known as the Milan Community Fair, a passage to summer.  It was built from the hard work and efforts of groups like the Civitans, Kiwanis, Rotarians, and several other groups and churches in the early years of the event.

Over the decades, many groups moved on to focus on their organization’s mission, and some dropped out due to the lack of membership and or volunteers. Over the years that followed, the group became known as the Milan Fair Board, a Non-Profit group made up of an all-volunteer group of area residents. While this group has seen its membership go up and down over the years, and at one point, it almost folded up due to the lack of volunteers, it continued to survive the challenges it faced.

The Fair has been a part of Milan for 75 years, and apart from two years when the board tried to have the event at Sanford Road Park, it was in Wilson Park. And other than the interruption of the Covid year, the Fair has happened for 73 years in Wilson Park.

Each summer for 75 years, the carnival company would pull into town, set up in the park, and provide the community with carnival rides, games of chance, and, of course, carnival foods. The community event has kept the traditional things like the food, games, rides, and parade, but things like the queen contest and big merchants’ tent died off due to lack of interest and cost.

New things have been added over the years to keep the interest alive, and the biggest of those would be the fireworks display. The fireworks display started small and was originally started on the Little League fields across the river with a budget of just a few hundred dollars.  Somewhere around 30 years ago, one of the fair board’s officers had the idea of moving them to the island of Ford Lake, and well, the rest is history.

What once was a little attention-getter became the largest drawing event in Milan, bringing around 10,000 folks into Milan each year to see one of the largest free displays around. From hundreds of dollars in the beginning to tens of thousands of dollars today, it’s still the biggest event in Milan and is talked about all over the state. It is not just fair guests enjoying them; families all around our community are hosting viewing parties all around the Ford Lake area. The fair’s crown jewel event is the most expensive to hold, and without the support events during the fair and some local sponsorships, it could not have happened.

Somewhere around 2009 or 2010, the fair board worked with the City Council, Chief of Police, and City Attorneys to get approval for a beer tent or as the fair board calls it, “The Entertainment Tent.”  This was done to help raise money to pay for the fireworks and other related cost of the event.  With this addition, the fair could continue to survive the rising cost of hosting the fair each year.

While the fair has its critics, it’s still the biggest event in Milan and has a huge impact on bringing folks into our community, which in turn adds to the local economy over the several days of the event. Local restaurants, Party stores, gas stations, and even some service-related businesses benefit each year during the fair. Even with today’s economy, the fair has survived and grown in several ways, thanks to the efforts of all-important volunteers.

Volunteers, oh yes, are the fuel that keeps the fair engine running, the volunteers that make up the organization that continues to keep this tradition alive. 

From the beginning, it’s been the volunteers who made it all happen, the non-paid local folks who believe in their community and want to keep things like this event alive.  Events like this need people to plan and execute to make it happen. The fair takes a lot of planning, and these volunteers meet each month for 10 or 11 months to work out the details and secure what is needed to make it possible. Then, they spend the days before, during, and after the event making it happen.  It takes days before the event to set up and prepare everything for the fair, then all the work during the event to keep things moving, and then, when it’s over, tear it all down and pack it away till next year.