The Camden County Fair, an annual tradition presented by the Board of Camden County Freeholders, is this weekend on Friday from 4 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the county Fairgrounds located at 508 Lakeland Road in Gloucester Township.
At the fair, families and kids can enjoy rides, games, carnival food and food trucks, live music and dance, exhibits, free pony rides, a petting zoo, 4-H youth projects and demonstrations and more.
With summer winding down and the fall quickly approaching, the Camden County Fair serves as an easy way to bring the community and residents back together after months of vacation and beach trips, something Freeholder Jeff Nash says he looks forward to every year.
“The fair has long served as a way for the community to get together and enjoy 4-H displays, rides, music, food and everything that a country fair might stand for and include,” said Nash. “Camden County is happy to be able to provide an event like this for its residents every year.”
Nash says that the thousands of residents who come out every year from the more than 30 municipalities within the county help connect the different communities, no matter how distant they might be, by hosting this event at the county Fairgrounds.
Residents get free admission and parking to the Camden County Fair on both days, while there will also be more than 100 vendors throughout the fair.
“It’s a great venue for family-friendly entertainment and it’s certainly affordable with the parking and admission being free, as well as food prices not being astronomical,” said Nash.
The site of the fair is also next to the home of Camden County’s Office of Sustainability, which has helped to create and promote numerous in-house programs that assist residents in various ways, such as through its tool-lending library, hydroponic greenhouse and more.
According to Director of Sustainability for Camden County Chris Waldron, his office will be providing tours to residents interested in learning more about its efforts out of the Lakeland campus. While keeping it fairly basic, the programs that allow residents to share resources and materials or for the county to donate fruits and vegetables to nonprofits can still be relatively unknown to a majority of county residents.
“We’ll be opening up our doors for tours, some guided and some unguided, through our greenhouses” said Waldron. “Our hydroponic greenhouse will be open and fully operational. We have six different varieties of growing techniques in hydroponics, so that’s pretty novel and not a lot of people know about it. We also have our large, main greenhouse where we are growing fall plants open for people to see. Lastly, we also have our perennial greenhouse as well, which we use for green infrastructure projects around the county.”
Additionally, the office will have members on hand at the building and greenhouses to discuss their projects and work within the community for those looking to learn more about sustainability. According to Waldron, the Office of Sustainability’s initiatives have grown to be very successful over the past few years, leading to the potential of new projects and construction in the near future.
For more information, visit CamdenCounty.com/2019Fair.
