The Drunkards’ Reunion: How the Tunbridge World’s Fair Went Wild and Came Home Again
On Howe Lane in Tunbridge, the Cilley Covered Bridge goes about its business the way it has since 1883. It is a modest thing, a single span of about 66 feet held up by a multiple kingpost truss, carrying a farm lane over the First Branch of the White River. In early autumn the hillside behind it turns orange, red and gold, and about the loudest sound around is the water underneath. It is as peaceful a corner of Vermont as you could ask for.
It was not always such a peaceful neighborhood. A few hundred yards up the road sit the grounds of the Tunbridge World’s Fair, and once a year, for many decades, that fair hosted some of the wildest celebrations the Vermont hills have ever seen. Officially, it was an agricultural fair. Unofficially, everybody knew what people called it: the Drunkards’ Reunion.
The fair started out about as respectable as anything in Vermont. It was founded in 1867, and in those early years a guest speaker, former Lieutenant Governor Burnham Martin, looked over the crowd and called it “a little world’s fair.” The name stuck. In 1875 the Union Agricultural Society opened a permanent fairground below Tunbridge Village, and the fair has been held on that ground ever since.
For generations it was exactly what a farm fair is supposed to be: cattle, oxen, horses and sheep, produce and handwork, and a few days for farm families to see the neighbors and measure their year’s work against everyone else’s. The state historical marker beside Route 110 describes it as a celebration of the “accomplishments of farmers and families,” and several of the fairground’s buildings still date to the nineteenth century.
Somewhere along the way, the fair picked up a second personality. By the middle of the twentieth century, drinking had become a fair tradition of its own. A Valley News columnist remembering the fairs of the late 1950s wrote that you could carry and drink alcohol anywhere on the fairgrounds, whatever the rules said. Strip tents, known then as girlie shows, worked the midway long after they had faded from most other fairs. The Society of Architectural Historians puts it plainly: the fair “developed notoriety in the later twentieth century, due mainly to public drunkenness and ‘girlie’ shows.” Euclid Farnham, the man who would eventually turn it around, didn’t sugarcoat it either. “We used to need a whole army of police,” he told the White River Valley Herald.
Farnham, a longtime fair director and Tunbridge historian, became president in 1978. The next year, the board voted to end the girlie shows for good; it was time, Farnham said, to “move onto something more enlightening.” Drinking was limited to a regulated beer hall, and the free-for-all camping that kept the parties going all night was brought under control. Then the fair turned its attention back to families. It added Education Days for schoolchildren, strengthened its agricultural programs, and built up the Antique Hill exhibits of old tools and farm equipment gathered from around central Vermont.
It worked. Farnham led the fair for more than three decades, and what he handed on was busier, and far friendlier to families, than what he inherited. Today the Tunbridge World’s Fair is once again what it set out to be in 1867: a farmer’s fair, held on what architectural historians call an exceptionally well-preserved nineteenth-century fairground. The old nickname lives on mostly as a story people love to tell, and on tap: Brocklebank Craft Brewing, on the Tunbridge and Chelsea town line, pours a beer called Drunkards’ Reunion.
The fairgrounds don’t sit quiet between Septembers, either. On October 3 and 4, 2026, they host the Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, with sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas and angora rabbits in the animal barn, fiber arts in Floral Hall, and herding and shearing demonstrations outside. It’s a fitting way to spend a fall weekend on ground that has been celebrating Vermont farm life for more than 150 years.
The Cilley Covered Bridge in early autumn is the photo on our Tunbridge, Vermont Signature Design shirt: the quiet side of a town with a famously loud past, and a piece of Tunbridge you can wear home.
