Meet the man who takes care of the cattle at the State Fair of WV
By Stephen Baldwin, RealWV
FAIRLEA— “It’s worth taking a trip here to the barns,” Billy McCormick says to the 185,000 people expected to attend the State Fair of West Virginia this year.
“This is an agricultural fair,” he continues. “Come visit the exhibitors and they’ll tell you about what’s going on with agriculture. They’ll tell you why local beef would be better than store bought beef and the challenges we have to make it in this agricultural industry.”
Exhibitors who bring cattle to the State Fair come from all over–West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, New York, and New Jersey. And Billy McCormick’s job is to take care of them all.
“It’s been a while now that I’ve been Beef Superintendent,” he says. “Bob Sherwood was in the job before me and needed some help. The shows were way bigger then than they are now. But when he lost him to a tractor accident, the fair asked me to take over.”
McCormick has been in the position for 40 years now. Ben Morgan serves as his assistant. What does the Beef Superintendent do?
“We pore over all the entries and we figure out where we’re gonna place each exhibitor in a barn and give them a space for their cattle and for their tack. And then we have to check all the registration papers when they get here and break all the show classes out. Then on show day, we make sure that they’re up here at the end of the ring ready to go in and we keep the show moving along smoothly as we can.”
The hardest part of the job, McCormick says with a grin, isn’t managing the animals. It’s the people.
“It’s just always a challenge to get everybody happy, but we do our best to get people where they need to be in the barn to take care of their animals and get where they need to go for their other shows.”
McCormick says his job is made easier by the barn improvements the fair has invested in over the years.
“Over the years, they have kept these barns in good shape,” he says. “Next, we would like to replace our show ring. It’s old, and it gets hot in that show ring some days. And they want to replace that last old barn.But, you know, it takes support from the state and stuff to help keep this facility going. And we’d hate to lose that support.”
For McCormick, being Beef Superintendent is more than a job; it’s a calling. He makes a small stipend, but he jokes that he uses it all on fair food.
“Basically, it’s a volunteer job. But that’s just how it is. Being in the beef industry myself, we work all the time just to make ends meet. It didn’t used to be like that. But it’s just how it is now.”
McCormick hopes that by keeping the agricultural traditions of the fair alive, it will support the educational, economic, and employment systems that have made family farming an important part of West Virginia’s culture for many years.
“It’s worth the time we put in,” he says. “So take a few minutes when you come to the fair this year to talk to these exhibitors.”
The State Fair of West Virginia is Aug 7-16, 2025. This year marks the 100th edition of the famed event.
This story is part of a series leading up to the 100th State Fair of West Virginia, which is funded in part by the Peyton Fund of the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation.
