Long before Long Island had highways, shopping malls or a single traffic circle, it had a fair. The Long Island Fair traces its roots back to 1842, making it one of the longest-running fairs in New York State, and this September it returns for its 184th year, running September 25 through 27 at Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

The fair did not always have a permanent home. In its earliest decades, it moved between vacant lots and farmers' fields as development reshaped the region around it, a fitting arrangement for an event built to celebrate the agricultural life of a place that would eventually pave over most of its farmland. In the mid-20th century, the fair settled at Roosevelt Raceway, where it remained until 1970, when it relocated to Old Bethpage Village Restoration, the living-history museum where it has been held ever since.

That permanence has not diluted what makes the Long Island Fair distinct: it remains the only county fair officially sanctioned by New York State for the counties of Nassau, Suffolk and Queens, an old-fashioned agricultural fair persisting in one of the most densely developed corners of the country. Exhibitors still compete for blue ribbons in categories rooted in the fair's original purpose, from livestock and produce to baking and handcrafted goods, alongside a craft show, hands-on activities for kids, and entertainment spread across the historic village grounds.

Old Bethpage Village Restoration itself, a recreated 19th-century farming community run by Nassau County, gives the fair a setting that would be nearly impossible to fake anywhere else on Long Island. Wandering between the fair's competitive exhibits and the village's period buildings, visitors get a rare, unforced sense of what agricultural Long Island actually looked and felt like, well before the Gold Coast mansions, the parkways, and the split-level suburbs arrived.

For a fair that predates the Civil War, the Brooklyn Bridge and the incorporation of most of the towns that now host it, 184 consecutive years is a genuinely rare kind of longevity. It has outlasted the vacant lots it started on, survived a decades-long stint at a horse track, and settled into a museum built specifically to preserve the way of life the fair was founded to celebrate. Registration for competitive exhibits is open now through lifair.org, ahead of the September weekend when Old Bethpage Village Restoration once again fills with blue ribbons, prize pumpkins and the particular, unhurried energy of a county fair that has been doing this since 1842.