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Withers farm family marks 100 years of showing cattle at 170th fair
CANFIELD
Back when Howard “Beanie” Withers started showing cattle at the Canfield Fair, the journey to the fair and back was a two-day ordeal.
Though the Withers family farm was relatively close to the fairgrounds, the group traveled to the fair on foot.
Today, the Withers’ journey to the fair is shorter, but their presence has grown into a tradition that Steve Moff, fair cattle superintendent, calls “unique.”
That’s because this marks the 100th year that Withers Honey Creek Farms — a 400-acre dairy farm in Petersburg that’s operated by Beanie’s son, Gordon “Gordie” Withers and Gordie’s son Howie — is showing its milking shorthorns at the fair.
Gordie and his wife, Beverly – surrounded by a slew of family members gathered in one of the dairy cattle barns – reflected on the milestone.
“This is home. And it’s a neater, bigger, better county fair than any you’ll go to,” said Gordie. “It’s a good experience. You meet a lot of people and make a lot of friends.”
Beverly pointed out a photo board attached to a barn wall, where dozens of pictures chronicle the family’s life in the farming business.
In one photo dated 1929, Beanie gazes at his wife, Gracie, from a barn stall as she sits perched atop a haystack. In another, Gordie’s granddaughter Ruby — then a baby — nestles up against a calf in a stall.
“We’ve been around and back again,” remarked Gordie, staring at the photo board.
The family farming tradition started with Gordie’s grandfather, a farmer who gave each of his three sons money to start farms. That tradition, including annual exhibitions at the Canfield Fair, was ingrained in Gordie from an early age.
“I was here when I was born,” he said, laughing.
He remembers when the cattle area moved from the opposite end of the fairgrounds to where it’s now located, on the southern end.
“One of the things I remember most, the second year we moved down to this side of the grounds, we had 4 inches of rain. Everything was under water,” he said.
Beverly fondly recalls a parade that used to take place at the fair.
“One of the things the people enjoyed for many, many years was the parade around the track each evening,” she said. “If you led an animal around the track, you got a free ticket. ”
Gordie also counts as a highlight his crowning as 4-H King in the late 1950s, a memory captured in one of the photographs in the barn.
Mixed in with all of the good times, of course, has been a lot of hard work, which they’re glad hasn’t stopped the younger Withers generations from carrying on the tradition.
This week, relatives from near and far are traveling to be at the fair to mark the 100-year milestone.
Gordie and Beverly’s daughter, Ginger, is traveling cross-country to be here.
Their neice, Sherri Staib, and her children, Jon and Lori, made the 12-hour drive from New York to show their own cattle here.
“I grew up showing cows here, just the way we all did,” said Staib. “I had the grand champion 4-H beef steer in 1970.”
She recalled how she and her cousins would sleep in lofts above the cattle.
“It means a lot,” said Gordie, of passing on the tradition. “It’s something not too many people have done, or will do.”
“It’s nice to know they have an interest and they want to carry it on,” added Beverly. “It’s heartwarming. It’s a lot of work.”