{"id":454517,"date":"2026-10-02T18:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T18:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/454517\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T18:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T18:58:11","slug":"why-dallas-biggest-tradition-actually-began-in-houston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/454517\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Dallas’ biggest tradition actually began in Houston"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’ll admit I came into this one looking for an excuse to take a few shots at Dallas, as any Houstonian would (and should) when handed a chance to fan the flames of an intrastate rivalry<\/a> that dates back to the 19th century.<\/p>\n

The State Fair of Texas<\/a>, now back at Dallas’ Fair Park with its corny dogs, its giant talking cowboy and its annual contest to fry whatever has yet to be fried, made for an easy target, I thought. Houston, the center of my universe, has the rodeo, after all, and no city in Texas can beat that spectacle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the more I read up on Dallas’ signature event, which runs through Oct. 18 this year, the more I realized the joke was on Houston. Because the State Fair of Texas actually began here,\u00a0along Buffalo Bayou in 1870<\/a>, and the city let it get away.<\/p>\n

How the State Fair of Texas got its start in Houston<\/p>\n

The original state fair<\/a> was the brainchild of attorney and politician John Thomas Brady<\/a>, who got a group of local leaders together and organized the event under the clunky banner of the Agricultural, Mechanical and Blood Stock Association of Texas.<\/p>\n

The first iteration was held in 1870 just south of Washington Avenue, on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, where\u00a0Houstonians still gather for massive civic events today. The fairgrounds were moved to a bigger site in what we know as Midtown <\/a>by 1872.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1870s, Houston’s version of the state fair included a grandstand and a racetrack. The city had even laid streetcar track so large crowds of fairgoers could ride from downtown right up to the front gate. (Knowing the nature of mass transit in Houston,<\/a> I would bet that the streetcars probably ran late.)<\/p>\n

But by the end of the decade, with attendance dwindling, the whole thing went under. The Agricultural, Mechanical and Blood Stock Association of Texas held its last fair in 1878 and went bankrupt the next year, a fate Houstonians would come to know well, especially in this century, as music and arts festivals came and went.<\/a><\/p>\n

How the State Fair of Texas ended up in … Dallas<\/p>\n

Dallas actually managed to host two state fairs at once<\/a> after the event floundered in Houston.<\/p>\n

In 1886, a group of the North Texas businessmen decided to revive it as the Dallas State Fair, but they couldn’t agree on where to hold it. The squabble led to a rival faction of organizers putting on their own event, the Texas State Fair and Exposition, which opened just one day before the original. Neither made enough money, so the organizations merged the following year.<\/p>\n

Dallas has hosted the State Fair of Texas ever since.<\/p>\n

Houston took more than half a century to come up with an answer that stuck. There was the No-Tsu-Oh festival<\/a>, a kind of Houston Mardi Gras that featured masked party-goers, cross-dressers and drunks dressed as crawfish, but that vanished by the end of World War I.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1931, a group of businessmen met at the Texas State Hotel downtown and decided to put on a livestock exposition, and the first Houston Fat Stock Show opened the next spring<\/a> at the old Democratic Convention Hall. It would eventually become the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.<\/p>\n

Nearly a century later, the rodeo is as much a part of Houston’s identity as the state fair is of Dallas’, so I’d say we came out of it just fine. But every fall, when Big Tex goes up and those Red River rivals play their little football game, remember that Dallas’ biggest tradition started out as one of ours.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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This article originally published at Why Dallas’ biggest tradition actually began in Houston<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Join us on a journey to better understand Houston, one question at a time. Sign up to get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-454517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}