Few people on the planet have the skill to drive a team of eight draft horses. 

You can see that singular skill in spectacular action only once during this year’s Northwest Washington Fair on Friday, Aug. 21. 

Each horse weighs about 2,000 pounds. Their horseshoes are the size of dinner plates. Harnessed together in lead, point, swing and wheel teams, that makes for eight tons of might and muscle that each driver controls only with leather lines, voice and an all-but-token hand brake. 

Up here in the northwesternmost part of the United States, a rare cluster of families come together each August to drive six- and eight-horse hitches at the fair grandstand – and teach future generations. They’re tops at what they do, with often-homebred horses, a different lineage and more varied skill set than the Amish, Scottish and other regions known for showing draft horses. 

Nowhere else in the world

“There’s not another place in the United States is as crazy as we are here in Lynden,” driver Fred Polinder Jr. once said. A dairy farmer who showed draft horses at the fair starting after World War II, Polinder, who died in 2015, judged horse shows from Scotland to Saskatchewan. 

At the fair, they do what’s called the free drive. Drivers and horses let loose and careen around the grandstand arena in a stirring display that’s done nowhere else in the world, according to Polinder. 

In this video, you’ll see Scott Hamstra drive the Mt. Baker Clydesdales, Alan Manning steer the Shezam Clydesdales and Craig Wilder take the lines of the Reinbow Ranch spotted paint horses. 

These men may be champions, but they’d be the first to say they’re still learning. They say they’re just passing down what they were given.

Early mornings at the fair, Willard Wilder taught Alan Manning to drive by hitching a team and driving around the fairgrounds.

Scott Hamstra was taught by his father, Bob Hamstra, currently the open-class heavy-horse superintendent at the fair. In turn, Bob Hamstra says he owes his abilities to what he learned in the fair’s draft-horse barn from Fred Polinder Jr. and Bill Shagren. Scott’s son, Ryan Hamstra, rides alongside him in the ring, continuing the hands-on heritage. 

Alan Manning will tell you how long ago he asked draft horse driver Willard Wilder to teach him. In the early mornings at the fair, he recalls, they’d hitch a team and practice by driving around the fairgrounds. 

Paul Nelson, a Vietnam War veteran and owner of the Reinbow Ranch team, said he was honored to have “a master like Craig Wilder” drive his beloved horses.

Some of the formidable horsemen seen in this 2018 video — Pete Groen, Paul Nelson and Craig Shagren — are now gone. But you can still see their devotion to their community and horsemanship on a morning in August 2018, when three teams drove eight-horse hitches at the Northwest Washington Fair. 

Note: Usually we use local music in our videos, but this 2018 video featured music by Ketsa, Creative Commons License, Attribution (CC BY): Music by ketsa.uk

U.S. Army veteran Clark Cotner of Birch Bay, Wash., had just taught himself to paint when friends talked him into entering one of his pictures at the 2013 Northwest Washington Fair. He ended up winning the Best of Division grand prize!

In this video, Cotner explains what showing at the fair means to him and how painting helps him heal from injuries suffered during his service. We talked to him in the old Expo Building where Cotner was doing a painting demonstration at the fair in 2013. 

At that time, Clark Cotner said that, with his painting teacher’s encouragement, he’d enrolled in art school. You never know where entering and showing your work at the fair will take you!

If you go to the Northwest Washington Fair early in the morning, you’ll see hundreds of kids washing, brushing and grooming their critters (and their pens) so they look their shiniest and prettiest when they show. 

Travis VanZanten of Lynden was one of those exhibitors at the 2013 fair. (There were a total of 1,311 at the 2023 fair.) He’d shown beef cattle at the Northwest Washington Fair for five years when we talked to him. Then heading into his junior year at Lynden High School, where he also played football, he belonged to the ShowMasters 4-H Club. We saw him in action in the barn, at the washrack and in the ring, with his Limousin steer. He says he loves the work and remembers he could hardly wait to be old enough to show.

In this Fair Share, you’ll hear him explain why he thinks Limousins (and their gorgeous glossy coats) are the best, what it’s like to compete against his friends, and a funny fair memory that landed him in the newspaper.  

In the beef cattle barn, exhibitors blow dry the cattle after they’ve been washed to give their coats more volume. Exhibitors want them to look, well, meatier. That’s important  if they’re going to sell their animal at the market sale because they want more money per pound. One fair mom explained that it takes 30 minutes to an hour to dry an animal, working forward from the butt to add depth and volume. 

The “hair dryers” are two-foot-long blue tubes that resemble cannister vacuum cleaners with extra-long hoses. The cattle are set up in a rack for hairdrying, complete with a feed pan where they can nibble on feed and treats while they’re dried with high-pressure ambient air, not heat. It’s like a beauty parlor for beef cattle!

As luxurious as their glossy sable-brown coat looks, it’s all for a practical purpose: “We want them to look like they’re carrying a lot of carcass,” a 4-H mom said. 

You can learn more about farming in our other Fair Shares – listen in to the fair fun!