Published, and republished with updates throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlases are artifacts that are often an excellent tool for researchers and historians wishing to learn information about buildings and properties in the more urban areas of Greene County.
Specifically, in a section of the 1918 edition of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas, we can go through town, building by building, and learn how they were constructed, what utilities they had, and in many instances, compare the maps to the streets we see today and get an insight into the history of many of our older structures and sites.
We can also track certain evolutions. In the 1918 Atlas, when looking at the area of town where Agway once was and where Waynesburg University’s Wiley Stadium now stands, we see what a former location of the Greene County Fairgrounds.
Yes indeed, the fairgrounds were not always at their present location on Route 21 between Sheetz and Bortz Chevrolet.
The Greene County Fair was held for the first time in 1867, by the Waynesburg Central Fair Association featuring livestock, home & garden exhibits, and horse racing at the site shown in the Sanborn Atlas that lines up with the current location of the Wiley Stadium. The fair was held consistently at that site until the early 1890s when a lawsuit involving a shooting gallery ended its decades long run. The fairgrounds remained vacant for a few years, until about 1896 or 1897, when a new organization revived the fair.
That was short lived when the fairgrounds were sold and divided into lots in 1901. What we see in the 1918 Sanborn Atlas are the remnants of buildings and tracks that had not yet been dismantled after the fairgrounds had been sold.
In 1911, however, The Waynesburg Fair and Agricultural Association purchased a 60-acre tract of land – the site where the fairgrounds are today. The fair would be held here each year from this point forward, missing only four years due to World War II and a year for the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 1940, the County of Greene purchased the fairgrounds from the Fair and Agricultural Association, thus securing the location for the Greene County Fair to be held for many more years to come.