Ride at the Champlain Valley Fair Credit: File: James Buck

The Addison County Fair & Field Days board has voted to prohibit vendors from selling Confederate flags or merchandise with images of the flag at the annual event, which runs from August 9 to 13 in New Haven.

The vote took place Monday and vendors have been notified of the new policy, according to Field Days business manager Cara Mullin.

In the past, Confederate flag merchandise has been sold at the agricultural fair that draws thousands of people to view horse team hitching, racing pigs, arm wrestling, tractor pulls and 4-H exhibits. The board’s vote came in response to concerns, Mullin said. 

She declined to comment further and referred a reporter to Field Days board president Jim Foster. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, a Change.org petition calling for a ban on Confederate flag merchandise had 417 signatures.

Nationally, the Confederate flag is increasingly criticized as a symbol of racism and the ugly legacy of slavery in the United States. Defenders of the flag, meanwhile, often portray it as a benign nod to Southern heritage and rural traditions. 

Although Vermont is a northern state, the debate about the flag and terms associated with it has been active here, too. Last year the South Burlington school board decided to keep “Rebels” as the name for high school teams despite criticism that the term had a racist taint. 

Also last year, a Burlington city employee who displayed a large Confederate flag on his truck in a Burlington Public Works parking lot generated ire as well as a free speech debate.

The Confederate flag flies Wednesday from a car at the BPW employee lot. Credit: Molly Walsh

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Molly Walsh was a Seven Days staff writer 2015-20.

8 replies on “Addison County Fair Bans Confederate Flag Merchandise”

  3. In my state, I could understand. (GA) Why would they have Confederate stuff at a Vermont Fair? Are there enough people buying it ? Uh Oh.

  4. Caledonia County Fair made the same decision earlier this year. Important education happening.

  5. It was an issue. I know people who didn’t feel safe because of it and the racist meaning behind the flag.

  6. I can only believe all that signed the petition were transplants from other states..I feel True Vermonters wouldn’t sign something that stupid..First off the CONFEDERATE FLAG is not racist!! It was a battle flag.. If people knew about this country’s history, the Civil War was not about slavery..I don’t understand why people (liberals) want to change our history..I am a 6th generation Vermonter..I know the United States history both south and North..There were brave men and women who fought, also there were blacks who joined (not forced) and fought the North..I feel that the Addison County Fair & Field Days board made a Big MISTAKE..There was never anything wrong with the CONFEDERATE FLAG until the last couple of yrs..Read up on the history of the south, the true history not what the liberals want you to believe..

  7. After WWII, Germany worked to de-Nazify the country and outlawed the public display (except for historical and educational purposes) of Nazi symbols such as the swastika flag. They did so to prevent radical elements in the country from latching onto them as a way of attempting to revive the racist fascist philosophy.

    After the Civil War, even General Lee’s inveighed against display of the symbols of the Confederacy (“I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered”.

    Unfortunately, the symbols of the Confederacy were not outlawed, and were soon adopted by white Southerners as a mark of resistance to racial equality and nostalgia for the slave holding days before the Civil War. This intensified when the flag became the symbol of opposition to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

    The irony of displaying Confederate symbols in Vermont should not be lost on anyone who claims to understand history. 34,000 Vermonters (out of a state population of 350,000) served in the war, and more than 5,000 died. Virtually every town in VT has memorials to those who fought for the Union. Displaying Confederate symbols is a slap at that history, and at the very idea of a state and country of racial equality.

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