Earlier this month, I sat in on the La Plata County Fairgrounds Master Plan meeting. The room was filled with members of the equine and agriculture community, eager to hear and hopefully share our needs for the facility. After the Ewing Mesa plan was scrapped, the fairgrounds have been in a limbo of sorts. With a wide variety of users in the community, the question has become what is fair for the users of the fairgrounds?
The La Plata County Fairgrounds not only has a significant place in our community’s history, but it holds a place of personal significance for me in my family history.
Constructed in the late 1800s, the La Plata County Fairgrounds was a major undertaking at the time. Noted as being “the largest Great Depression-era Works Progress Administration architectural project in Durango,” it still stands proud today and although it has gone through some architectural and general use changes over time, it still serves a vital role in our community.
In the 1950s my grandfather was the race commissioner of the fairgrounds and my family kept half a dozen horses in the original rock stalls and had a grandstand box where they attended races and rodeos.
Grandstands not only existed but held over 7,000 spectators. Seventy-five years ago, the fairgrounds were a much different place. Horses were at the forefront of the community. Fast forward to today, and horses, ranching and farming feel like more of an afterthought in a community that was founded on agriculture.
Watching the process of encroaching concrete, it feels like the city and county are tightening the reins on the horse facilities and the agricultural community in general. I listened to the architects and planners break down the usage by demographic from baseball to barrel racing and I have shoveled enough manure in my life to know it when I see it.
I would encourage the higher-ups making these assertions to attend a rodeo and get some dirt on their boots to see how much the horse community uses the fairgrounds. It’s every single day, 365 days a year. There are horses boarded at the facility year-round, which are fed twice a day, rodeos that bring in 12,000 spectators in the summer alone, and this number doesn’t include participants, rodeo royalty and animals. There are 4H gymkhanas, Fiesta Days Rodeos, the La Plata County Fair Gymkhana and horse clinics throughout the year.
“When you go to New York, you want to see a Broadway play, when you come to Durango you want to see a western event,” said Pam Petrie, owner of the rodeo True West Round Up.
Rodeo is huge for our history and our future. It is not only a tourist draw but also an outlet for participants to display their talent and hard work. It is sheer Western pride in seconds of dirt-flying fun. It is hot dogs, American flags and kids in cowboy hats and bandannas with dreams and it is history that serves a purpose still today.
Along with rodeo, 4H and FFA kids are huge users of the fairgrounds, I know this because I have one such of these kids and I watch her and her friends make the best of the amenities they have to work with. They have heavily used and outdated facilities and a rundown, falling down round pen while both of the lush green ball fields sit greatly unused a large portion of the year.
There is no place to turn out horses that are boarded in the unprotected stalls other than the covered warm-up arena. We literally have horses turned out in a dark, half-enclosed arena with a view of unused greener pastures.
Horses have been physically abused by being housed in unsecured stalls and kids’ tack stolen. I don’t want to start a range war between two different sports with my opinion. Any sport that encourages area youth to partake in physical activity is a win and I love baseball but there are a lot of baseball fields in the county and two of them sit where there was once dirt for horses.
We have only one horse facility in town and are asking for it to be updated to accommodate our rodeos and area youth with a safe environment to participate in their sport.
We are being bucked off slowly and right in front of our eyes. With the fairgrounds ball fields utilized a small portion in the grand scheme of the calendar year, it seems the adage “if you build it they will come,” isn’t all that true. The county has touted the need for both ball fields in its master plan and not expanded on the horse facilities because they believe the ball fields are the number one used facility in the 32-acre parcel.
I agree a facility needs to exist that encompasses a growing community’s modern needs, but it also needs to recognize and provide for the historical significance and to include horses. Many people in the area don’t get the chance to see or think about horses and agriculture other than one week out of a year when they attend the county fair.
What they don’t realize is that the other 358 days a year these kids and their families are out riding horses, raising and tending to livestock, growing crops and working the land that is slowly disappearing around us and it matters to everyone, not just the cowboys, farmers, ranchers, FFA and 4H kids. We all benefit from the agricultural community. If we not only remember our area’s heritage but celebrate it then we provide for it and for our future.
So here we sit in the grandstands of the community with the opportunity to bet on horses and when we bet on horses, as a community, we all win.
Jenny Johnston is a fourth-generation Durango local, Fiesta Days Rodeo Royalty Coordinator and wranglers to two lil’ buckaroos.
