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Photo: Martybiniasz, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Erie County Fair is the third-largest county fair in the United States by attendance, and is by far the longest-standing annual event in the area. The first fair was held in 1820 on what is today the site of Sahlen Field in downtown Buffalo; the fair has been held continually since 1841 with the exception of 1943, when it was cancelled due to World War II. Today, nearly a million Western New Yorkers pour into the suburb of Hamburg each year for two weeks in the middle of August that have long symbolized the bittersweet end of summer for locals. The fair still serves its original purpose as an agricultural exhibition intended to promote and showcase the area's traditions, talents, diversity and heritage in that field, but today it also features a huge midway with a wide range of carnival rides and games, a range of live music performances each year, gaming, and myriad other attractions.
The Erie County Fair is a fair held in Hamburg in Erie County, New York, every August. Based on 2018 attendance statistics, the Erie County Fair is the largest county fair in New York, the 3rd largest county fair in the United States, and the largest east of the Mississippi River. The fair often draws over one million people in attendance.
Owned and operated by the Hamburg Natural History Society, the Penn Dixie Paleontological and Outdoor Education Center is an outdoor site where visitors can find and collect many extraordinarily well-preserved fossils of sea animals such as trilobites, gastropods, and cnidarians that date from the Devonian Period, a time 380 million years ago when Western New York was under a tropical ocean. As well, the Penn Dixie site boasts a wide variety of habitats, such as wetlands, forest, and treeless brush, that serve as home to a similarly wide variety of animal life such as wild turkey, deer, coyote, reptiles, and migratory birds. Hiking and birdwatching are also popular activities, and special events occur on a regular basis.
The Buffalo Raceway features exciting live harness racing on its half-mile track from January through July, which is located on the grounds of the Erie County Fair in the suburb of Hamburg. Visitors can watch the races from the comfort of The Clubhouse, which offers food and drinks as well as simulcast wagering year-round, with video feeds from tracks such as the Meadowlands Racetrack, Belmont Park, and Churchill Downs. At the Hamburg Gaming at the Fairgrounds, located on the fairgrounds in a nearby facility, fans of games of chance can enjoy nearly 1,000 slot machines as well as video poker.