Raw States

Kern County Fair

Bakersfield, CA · Festival

When

September 23 – October 4, 2026

Where

Kern County Fairgrounds, 1142 S P St · Bakersfield · CA

Cost

Not confirmed

Status

Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule

Bakersfield's twelve day county fair fills the Kern County Fairgrounds each fall with a carnival midway, livestock competitions and a nightly concert series at the Budweiser Pavilion. It is one of the larger county fairs in the southern Central Valley.

The history within reach

• Kern County Fairsame spot

  Bakersfield's twelve day county fair fills the Kern County Fairgrounds each fall with a carnival midway, livestock competitions and a nightly concert series at the Budweiser Pavilion.

• Dust Bowl migration reaches the valley1.0 mi

  Some 300,000 migrants from the southern plains reached California's agricultural valleys in the 1930s, the world of The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange's photographs..

• The Bakersfield Sound, Buck Owens' honky-tonk answer to Nashville2.4 mi

  Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, both from Okie families, made a hard electric country music built on Telecasters and a drummer, a deliberate answer to the strings and choirs coming out of Nashville.

• The Basque restaurants of Bakersfield2.4 mi

  Sheepherders from the Pyrenees came for the Kern County ranges and built boarding houses that fed men family-style at long tables.

• Merle Haggard4.8 mi

  Born in a converted railroad boxcar in Oildale to Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, the Okie of the song, literally.