Carolina Classic Fair (formerly Dixie Classic Fair)

The grain exposition that started in Salem in 1882 grew into something Winston-Salem takes seriously. A tobacco fair launched in 1897, the two events merged, and what emerged eventually became the Dixie Classic Fair — a name the city carried until 2019, when the Winston-Salem City Council voted to change it. The word "Dixie," the council determined, lauded the Confederate cause. The new name blended both predecessors: Carolina Classic Fair. The first full fair under that name ran in 2021.

This is a city shaped by tobacco and shaped by the merging of two towns — Winston and Salem, one built by industry, one by Moravian settlers who arrived in the mid-1700s and gathered around a central square. That dual heritage runs through everything here, including what the city chooses to celebrate and what it chooses to retire.

The fair runs every autumn at the Winston-Salem Fairgrounds, next to the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and draws the kind of crowd that makes it second only to the North Carolina State Fair in state attendance — a position it has held for many years. In 2007, attendance hit 371,219, ranking it 50th-best-attended in North America. The fairgrounds went dark during both World Wars, and again in 2020.

Come for the October air and the agricultural competition. Come because this is a fair that has had to reckon publicly with its own name — and kept going. The Carolina Classic Fair is not a monument. It's a working event, held by a working city, still figuring out what it wants to honor.