California’s oldest county fair happens in a town built on butter money, and it’s five miles off Highway 101

California’s oldest county fair doesn’t run in a big city, and it never has. It runs in a town of gingerbread-trimmed Victorian mansions on the Eel River Valley, five miles off Highway 101, that most people driving up 101 have never once turned off for.

Ferndale calls itself the Cream City, and it’s not a cute nickname someone invented for tourism. The whole town was built on butter, and this August it’s about to prove it’s still got the oldest fair in the state, running August 12–16, 2026.

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A town literally built on butter

Dairy farms took root in the Eel River Valley in the 1850s, and by the 1870s a wave of Danish immigrants had moved in and started forming their own dairy cooperatives. Each little cluster of farms ran its own creamery, and by 1890 there were eleven of them operating around Ferndale alone.

Ferndale butter was considered the best in the state and sold at premium prices in San Francisco. The dairy families spent that money on houses, and the results — locals call them “Butterfat Palaces” — are why the entire town sits on the National Register of Historic Places today.

Main Street is the actual attraction

You can walk Ferndale’s Main Street in twenty minutes, but that’s not really the point. The point is the ornate storefronts and the fact that almost none of them have been torn down and replaced since the dairy boom.

Fern Cottage, built in 1866, is a 30-room Victorian home still furnished the way a wealthy Ferndale dairy family would have lived — worth a stop if it’s open when you’re through. The Ferndale Museum next door fills in the rest of the creamery history in about half an hour.

Confident opinion: skip the postcard shot of Main Street from the sidewalk and walk up toward the cemetery instead. You get the whole row of Butterfat Palaces from above, with the Eel Valley behind them, and almost nobody bothers to make the climb.

The hike and the beach nobody mentions

Russ Park sits right at the south edge of town, and it’s not what you’d expect from a town this small — a genuine Sitka spruce forest, rarer around here than redwoods, laced with trails that wind past Zipporah Pond and open up to views over the Eel River Valley. Over 60 bird species have been logged inside the park.

The Ferndale Cemetery, right at the park’s entrance, is worth the detour on its own — nineteenth-century headstones climbing a hillside with the Pacific spread out below.

For the coast itself, Centerville Beach is about five miles from downtown: black sand, nine largely undeveloped miles of it. The Lost Coast Headlands sit six miles west. Neither is the multi-day Lost Coast Trail further south near the King Range — that’s a serious backpacking trip — but both give you a real stretch of that same untouched coastline without committing a weekend to it.

The fair that started it all

The Humboldt County Fair traces back to 1861, and it’s been running every year since except for a break during World War II — making it the oldest continuously running fair, and horse racing track, in California. It found its permanent home on the Ferndale fairgrounds in 1896 and never left.

This year’s run is August 12 through 16: carnival rides, livestock judging, horticulture displays, and fair food, all inside a town that was already old-fashioned before “old-fashioned” was a marketing angle. If you’re anywhere near Humboldt this month, it’s worth timing a trip around.

Getting there

Ferndale sits about 20 miles south of Eureka, roughly a 25-minute drive on Highway 101. If you’re coming up through the redwoods, the turnoff is about 10 miles south of where the Avenue of the Giants ends near Scotia, then about 5 miles west off 101 into town.

It’s an easy add-on to a bigger swing through Northern California’s redwood country rather than a standalone destination — an afternoon or an overnight, not a trip on its own.

Trip tips: grab a rental car to get out here, lock in your hotel before the good rooms are gone, or skip both and book a camper van instead for the coastal drive up.

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