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2012

Committee Information

Illinois State Fair Page

The ACS tent at the Fair is located in the Conservation World section of the Fair.  

In 2012 the weather was wonderful most of the time, except for some storms that moved through on Thursday, causing a temporary closing of Conservation World.  We were given a half of the large DNR tent just north of our previous location, and that was a real boon to us, as can be seen by our attendance ... the second highest in nine years.  We were on a concrete slab, keeping dust down, we had more room, more ventilation, and could have a discrete area for our popular science demonstrations, and an expanded hands-on area.

Past history:  In 2004 we had 7,777 visitors to our booth, and in 2005 our attendance was 11, 843, up by over 50%!!  2006 broke the 2005 record with 13,216 visitors.  We were plagued with heavy rains several days in 2007, hurting overall attendance.  The weather was great in 2008 and we set a new record with 14,626 visitors!   Finally 2009 had severe storms causing severe wind damage to some adjacent tents.  Our area of the Fair, Conservation World, closed early three days out of the ten. The 2011 Fair found weather that was warm, but not oppresively hot, and sunny and pleasant other than a brief storm that moved through on Saturday afternoon, causing the Fair to close down for about an hour.

The demonstrations and hands-on experiments have proved to be very popular, and we have added new experiments in both categories again this year.  We handed out packets of information and educational resources to all teachers that came to our tent and identify themselves. 

Thanks to financial support from a number of Illinois corporations, we have expanded the size of the tent by 50% in the last few years to accommodate the increased number of visitors.

Check out the photos from:   2004,  2005,  2006,  2007,   2008,   2009,  2010,  2011  2012 photos coming soon.

Here is the daily tally of the number of visitors to our booth for each year.

*   Extensive storms caused Conservation World to close early.
** Tornados in the area and high winds caused extensive damage to nearby tents and a mid-afternoon closing of Conservation World.
⁺   Storms caused Conservation World to close for a while, then storms passed and we re-opened.