Another Niverville Olde Tyme Country Fair has come and gone, and most of us are already looking toward our next big summer adventure.
But for the hard-working fair committee, there’s still much to do once the last guest leaves the street.
In fact, it takes a whole other army of volunteers on Sunday of the fair weekend to wrap things up. Fences and staging is deconstructed, ticket booths and tables are hauled away, and signage and tents are wrapped up and tucked into storage.
Unless it’s a rain year, as this year was. Then most of these items are unwrapped and unravelled a few days later, wiped down, dried, and then returned to storage until next year.
In the days following the fair, the committee reunites to take care of all the final details, including number-crunching and assessing the things that worked and those that didn’t.
The Citizen dropped by for one of the committee’s wrap-up meetings to get their thoughts on this year’s big event.
The 2025 committee consists of 19 core members, each with their individual roles and responsibilities. They’ve been volunteering on the committee for between three and 15 years, some longer when you consider their years of regular fair volunteering.
As they collected on Wednesday after the fair to mull over the weekend’s highs and lows, they all agreed that this year’s dump of rain put only a mild damper on spirits.
The street seemed as full as it ever was, with likely between 15,000 to 20,000 guests over the course of two days.
“People were seeing the value in pre-sales and pre-pickups to get through the gates a lot faster,” says member Jonelle Donnelly.
Equally pleasing for this group of organizers was the return of attendees on Saturday night after a bout of torrential rain caused a temporary exodus during the mainstage shows.
Despite the fact that the rainstorm was forecasted well in advance, the committee says online presales were hot this year, reaching previous year sales levels in record time.
“I think we had a killer lineup this year,” says Raesha Enns. “We also had different entertainment that we haven’t had before. The wrestlers were new, the snowmobile in the [extreme] motocross, and Al Simmons was big.”
This year, unlike some others, they didn’t need to shut down gate sales on Saturday night and send people home due to overcapacity. For the committee, this was a pleasant outcome.
For the most part, the weekend went off without a hitch, with the exception of the rain.
The mainstage artists were readying for a full night of entertaining the hundreds of attendees when the skies opened up. The first act, Quentin Blair, volunteered to play on the Play Now stage inside a tent.
“I think he managed to play a 30-minute show while they got the mainstage dried and safe and made sure everything was working,” Enns says.
The other artists—Doc Walker, Michelle Wright, Jason McCoy, and Jess Moskaluke—huddled in for discussion on who should play if limited playtime was available.
“Everyone unanimously was, like, ‘No, everyone should cut [their show short] so that everyone gets a chance to play,’ says Enns. “They were very supportive of each other and supportive of us.”
Distant lightning and windy conditions left only two options, though: either don’t play or take the show inside the nearby tent. They opted for the latter.
“One thing that I think most people don’t realize is what those entertainers have to do to [take their performance to another stage],” Irene Unrau says. “They’re not taking their own equipment along. They are playing someone else’s instrument and saying, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ They are simply doing it because they want people to get a show.”
Meanwhile, back in the green room, Moskaluke and Wright banded together to create a live Facebook video to keep the crowds outside informed and entertained as the rain pelted down.
Later, they took their impromptu duo to the tent stage.
“When Jess was finishing up in the Play Now tent, we all got to be there for the last song and Michelle Wright joined her on stage and they sang Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman,’” says Donnelly. “I thought that was just really, really cool.”
In the 15 years that Krahn has been on the committee, he says this is the first year where the mainstage had to be shut down for the night due to weather.
Family entertainer Al Simmons got his stage appearance in and, according to the committee, stayed long after he was done to help them keep things going.
“He helped everybody,” Amanda Dumont says. “He was soaking wet and in there helping.”
With all their weather woes, though, the committee agrees that it didn’t deter their resolve.
“With the rain and everything, it just throws a bunch of chaos at you,” Krahn says. “But we are a higher-functioning group when there’s stuff going wrong.”
For as many hours as this group dedicates to this annual event, they somehow always circle back to their gratitude for the community champions who come to their aid year after year.
“The church coordinates their own volunteers to come out and help clean up Friday night and Saturday night,” Donnelly says. “They’ve been here until the sun is coming up [some years]. This year, we also coordinated volunteers to come on Sunday afternoon and help us clean up. They were a bunch of high school students. They worked through the rain and they get a special shoutout. They were absolutely amazing!”
In a similar vein, the committee knows they can count on one family who takes personal responsibility for cleaning up the schoolyard after the fireworks every year, without fail.
“There’s those people that we don’t call, we don’t text, they just show up,” Enns says. “People like that are invaluable.”
According to the committee, it takes around $375,000 to pull off a fair of this magnitude every year. There is some funding available from three levels of government, which certainly helps, they say.
Local business sponsorship and ticket sales cover the rest.
“If you consider our budget, a little under one-third of that comes from sponsorship,” says Shereen Rashwan.
It’s a tricky balance for this team to create two solid days of back-to-back entertainment and still keep the tickets affordable, but they’ve been finding ways to do that.
Online sales with early bird pricing is one way for attendees to get a discount. Another is simply to become one of the 300 weekend volunteers who make the fair go. In recent years, volunteers have received free wristbands just for taking a shift.
When asked when they’ll begin planning for next year, Krahn says it started three months ago. While they’re hesitant to throw out any teasers just yet, some 2026 stage entertainers are already booked.
This year, 30-year fair veteran Jeff Stott didn’t make it to the fair due to a serious accident just weeks earlier. Even so, he was doing live interviews with radio stations to promote the event. The fair committee sends Jeff a very special shoutout, reminding him that he was missed.