Children and tents at a county fair midway, Colorado

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Children crowd the walkway between rows of canvas tents on a county fair midway in Colorado, the kind of temporary street that appeared each late summer in farm towns across the state. Fairs of this sort gathered rural families for livestock judging, produce contests, and rides and games, and the midway was where young visitors spent most of their admission money. Look at the variety of hats, the open tent flaps, and the way the children cluster near the stalls, which tells you how central these grounds were to community life before the era of paved amusement parks.

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