Numbers show fair is a Texas-size event
From the size of Big Tex’s shoes to how much mustard is expected to go on hot dogs, a breakdown of the annual event
The State Fair of Texas has opened its gates for a 24-day run of fried culinary concoctions, carnival rides, midway games, car shows, rodeo competitions, livestock shows, shopping, concerts and college football.
More than 2 million people were expected to walk the grounds, which total about 12 million square feet. Some will park in one of the fair’s 7,000 parking spots, sample some of the 41 new foods and drinks from concessionaires or breeze past the 344 animals.
Here are 24 by-the-numbers fair facts.
• Dallas Area Rapid Transit will stop at Fair Park more than 800 times in 24 days.
• Concessionaires estimate that they’ll hand out 2 million packets of ketchup. Just Fletcher’s Corny Dogs customers alone will squirt 1,500 gallons of mustard and 800 gallons of ketchup. Why so much more mustard? Because that’s the proper way to accessorize a corny dog, says the Fletcher family, which brought corny dogs to the fair in 1942. They plan to sell more than 500,000 corny dogs at the 2022 fair.
• The fair hosts an Arts & Crafts contest every year, and 7,890 entries were submitted in 2022 for categories such as needlework, ceramics, Glue-A-Shoe and canning. The canning category equaled about 112 gallons of food, which would fill Big Tex’s 95-gallon hat more than once. (But they’d never do that, eww!)
• Big Tex is 55 feet tall — 3 feet taller than he used to be, before Tex caught fire in 2012. He wears a size 96 Lucchese boot and jeans with a 20-foot inseam. The jeans weigh 100 pounds.
• Centennial Hall, the largest exhibit building in Fair Park, was built more than 100 years ago, in 1905. The oldest freestanding restaurant on the grounds is the Old Mill Inn, which opened in 1936 for the Texas Centennial Exposition.
It’s the second-oldest restaurant in Dallas.
• In 1930, it cost $328,000 to build the Cotton Bowl. (In today’s money, that’s $5.8 million.) The Cotton Bowl seats up to 100,000 people now.
• Among the 70 games on the Midway this year, carnival barkers will give out about 400,000 plush prizes worth about $1.3 million.
• At Big Tex Urban Farms, 13,281 heads of butter lettuce have been produced in 2022. The fair expects about 80 animals to be born in the livestock birthing barn.
• The Texas Discovery Garden plans to release 200 to 250 tagged monarchs to track their migration. So far, just four tagged monarchs were found in Mexico in 2009.
• The University of Texas started playing the University of Oklahoma in an annual rivalry game in 1900 — not at the fair, at first. In the past two decades, Oklahoma has won 13 out of 20 times.