The Summer Maplewood Gets Its Fair Back
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
For six years, the brick barn at 2020 White Bear Avenue sat quiet through July. Corn dogs, 4-H ribbons, the smell of trampled grass by the horse stable — all of it paused in 2020 and never came back. Until now. On July 16, the Ramsey County Fair opens its gates for the first time since 2019, and if you already live in Maplewood, that single change reshapes the shape of the next few weekends more than anything else on the summer calendar.
This post is about what to do with that. Not a moving guide, not a roundup of everything happening in the east metro. A resident's read on where the good stuff sits this July and August, and how the returning fair pulls the rest of Maplewood's summer into orbit around it.
The Ramsey County Fair is returning to its Maplewood home after six consecutive years of cancellations driven by pandemic shutdowns and continuing disputes over fairground access. The independently run fair, hosted by the Ramsey County Agricultural Society, will return July 16–19 after years of uncertainty over access to the historic Ramsey County Poor Farm grounds. That backdrop matters, because the fight over the fair was almost entirely local. In February, officials from Ramsey County Parks and Recreation and the Agricultural Society settled on a $3,500 event fee. For years, they had negotiated over a county-proposed event fee of $25,000. A roughly sevenfold cut to the event fee is what got the fair open. If you've been in Maplewood long enough to remember the pre-2020 version, that's the number to hold onto.
The practical shape of the weekend:
| Detail | This year |
|---|---|
| Dates | July 16–19, 2026 |
| Location | 2020 White Bear Avenue, corner of Frost & White Bear |
| Admission | Free |
| Parking | $10 per vehicle |
| Programming | Daily 4-H, petting zoo, beer tents, rides, food, music |
Organizers say the revived fair will still emphasize agriculture, with daily 4-H programming, a petting zoo featuring an array of animals and educational exhibits, while also offering 21+ attractions such as multiple beer tents. One of the new additions is a mobile model dairy cow used to teach children how to milk the real deal. The fake cow on wheels is charming, but the real story is quieter: Minnesota's 87 counties are home to 105 annual and seasonal county fairs, leaving Ramsey as one of the few counties without one since 2020. Being a resident of the county that finally has its fair back after being an outlier for half a decade is the kind of thing that only lands if you've been paying attention.
Enter on Ripley Avenue if you're driving from the south side of the neighborhood. The fair sits one mile south of Highway 36, so from most of Maplewood you're inside ten minutes.
If crowds aren't your thing, or you want a slower Saturday to bookend a loud Friday at the fair, drive north on White Bear Avenue and cut east on County Road D. Two blocks past Maplewood Mall you'll find the Bruentrup Heritage Farm. This is the piece of local history most Maplewood residents drive past without registering.
The Bruentrup Heritage Farm is a historic farmstead and museum located in Maplewood. Established in 1891, the farm was home to four generations of the Bruentrup family until 1999. Today, it is operated by the Maplewood Area Historical Society as a history museum. The story of how the buildings got where they are is worth telling once at your kitchen table. By the late 20th century, Maplewood experienced significant development pressure. In 1997, developers purchased the land surrounding the farm, but the Bruentrup family retained ownership of the buildings. The Maplewood City Council offered 2.5 acres of land on County Road D to relocate the farmstead buildings. Through fundraising efforts with the Bruentrup family's cooperation, the MAHS successfully moved the historic structures to their current location in 1999. The Maplewood Mall parking lot you know is, quite literally, the pastureland the buildings used to sit on.
Two things to actually do out there this summer:
Walk out the back of the farmyard and you're in the Prairie Farm Preserve. The terrain is rolling slopes; the site has a short paved trail (four-tenths of a mile) that is handicapped accessible. Bicycles are permitted on the paved trail only. A four-tenths-of-a-mile paved loop through restored prairie doesn't sound like much until you're on it in July with the little bluestem shoulder-high and the barn's red roof popping over the ridge. Maplewood received a Conservation Partners Legacy grant to enhance pollinator habitat at Prairie Farm Preserve. About one-third of the grassland at the Farm is a diverse mix of prairie flowers and grasses, and these high quality areas are being preserved. The remaining grassland is being restored to prairie. The pollinator work is the reason August out there is louder with insects than most city parks.
The other place worth pointing at this summer is Wakefield Park, on the south side of the city. If the last time you were there was during construction fencing, you owe yourself a return trip. Maplewood has transformed Wakefield Park into one of the City's signature recreational spaces, with a new community building, additional picnic shelter, new playground and other site improvements.
The community building is the biggest change. It's rentable, which matters if you're the household that keeps hosting the extended-family birthday party in a garage in August. And the city is programming it. On July 8 there was Celebrate Summer at Afton Park on Sterling Street, one of the smaller neighborhood evenings the parks department has been leaning into now that Wakefield is finished and the crew has bandwidth again.
If you have a dog, Battle Creek Regional Park's off-leash area sits on the south end of Maplewood and is the quiet complement to a Wakefield afternoon. Between the two, plus the Prairie Farm loop up north, you have three distinct outdoor moves without ever crossing a county line.
The dining question in Maplewood has always been whether to stay in the neighborhood or drift over the Saint Paul line to Payne-Phalen. Both are fair, but a few in-neighborhood anchors deserve mention if you're pairing dinner with a fair afternoon or a Bruentrup morning:
None of these are secrets. That's the point. When the fair pulls a few thousand extra people through the neighborhood on a Saturday night, the places that were already good are the places worth knowing your order at.
Here's the thesis, plainly. For six summers, the Maplewood calendar had a hole in mid-July that residents filled by driving to Washington County's fair in Stillwater or the Dakota County fair in Farmington. Those are both fine. Neither is home. The Ramsey County Fair moved to Maplewood in 1954, to the recently vacated farm plots of the Ramsey County Poor Farm. Seventy-two years of that fair being a Maplewood thing, six years of it not being, and now it's back on a $3,500 event fee that took a state senator's intervention to negotiate.
That's the moment you're living in this July. The fair coming back also puts new light on the rest of the summer catalog, because everything within a two-mile radius of White Bear Avenue and Frost is suddenly reintroducing itself to neighbors who forgot it was there. Bruentrup, Prairie Farm, Wakefield, the diner where you used to grab breakfast before dropping the kids at 4-H. That whole tissue of small places only works when the anchor is open.
Enjoy the weekend. Bring cash for parking. If you run into a mayor and a cow, you'll know the tradition is properly back.
If you're thinking about what a summer like this one, with a full local calendar and a neighborhood that's clearly investing in its own parks and public spaces, means for property values or for what your home might sell for this fall, that's a conversation worth having over coffee. Gary Bredeson has been working the east metro for nearly two decades and knows the block-by-block texture of Maplewood as well as anyone. Let's Connect — Call or Email Gary Today.
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