Work preps stage for fairgrounds, ballpark

With the 2009 Faulkner County Fair over with, the YBMA Fairgrounds will soon be no more.

This week about 30 people were salvaging materials such as tin and lumber from the exhibit halls and other buildings that have served the fair for generations. Fencing, lights and other materials at the YBMA Ballpark were being taken down for use by Guy, Vilonia and Mayflower youth baseball programs.

Next week, Salter Construction Co. will finish demolishing whatever is left and start to transform the fairgrounds into College Station Park, a nine-field youth baseball complex described by Mayor Tab Townsell as “the jewel in the crown” of the city’s parks system.

A few miles east on Highway 64, at the 40-acre site of the new fairgrounds, Salter Construction Co. workers have prepared the footprints of the new exhibit and livestock hall for concrete work, which should also begin next week according to project manager Michael Todd.

Other dismantling work was going on this week at the old Ward Transportation Sales building on Amity Road. The property’s new owner, Ken Patel, had offered in August to donate the building to the city for use at the new fairgrounds if he wouldn’t need the building on the property for collateral in his loan to redevelop the property. Assistant to the mayor Jack Bell said Patel’s financial advisers had told Patel that the building could be donated, and its disassembled components should be transported to the new site this week to be rebuilt as the new fairgrounds’ livestock hall.

The new fairgrounds are “likely to be completed around the end of July” city engineer Ronnie Hall said, giving several weeks for finishing touches before the 2010 Faulkner County Fair. 

“I’m sure the buildings will be done, but the challenge will be to get the parking lots completed after we get out of the wet weather in the spring,” Hall said, adding that having the fair with grass parking lots rather than gravel “won’t be a disaster.”

The exhibit hall for the new fairgrounds, a new pre-engineered structure, should start arriving on Oct. 12. Other existing materials, including metal beams and trusses from some buildings at the old fairgrounds, will also be recycled for use at the new site and for a maintenance facility for the Conway Parks and Recreation Department, Todd said. 

Fletcher Smith, 57, a lifelong Conway resident and long-time member of the Faulkner County Fair Parade Board, said on Thursday that he understood that “everything changes” and that he looks forward to seeing the new fairgrounds, but was a little sad to see the old fairgrounds go.

“I just remember the fairgrounds as a little boy being out there,” Smith said. “Back then we had the ballpark and the fair and the movie theater and the swimming pool, and that was about all we had. Most of the kids just rode their bicycles there; the town was so small.

“It’s just pretty much where everybody grew up. Everybody I knew was on a ball team, and we had so many good times out at that ballpark. I know everything changes, but that place was just part of everybody’s soul.”

(Staff writer Joe Lamb can be reached at 505-1238 or by E-mail at joe.lamb@thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit.)