What are criterias for benches?

Are you getting fairground benches? Sorry, it was Grange Fair week :sweat_smile:

Grange Fair benches were mass produced because the Grange sold their benches with little to no moderation for years until they had sold so many there was nowhere to put them all. Other fairs liked the Grange Fair benches and started making their own. Most of the other rural fairs are smaller and are unlikely to be as oversaturated with benches.

First read this post if you’re a city person or suburbanite:

Here are some suggestions I had for judging the importance of a person

  • Staff are a pretty safe bet because fair staff typically go above and beyond for their fair until they die.
  • Longtime or lifetime fairgoers are not significant, particularly with the Grange Fair, because people travel great distances to visit “their” fair. (Hi :wave: it’s my secondary location for this reason)
  • Community organizations (FFAs, Granges, 4Hs, Scouts, etc) are good stops are very small fairs. If there’s a multiple types on animals share one barn, a 4H bench about the group dedicated one of them would be a good stop. (Ex: A bench for the goat 4H at a fair where they share a barn with sheep.)
  • If you see one mentioning the person being a vendor, hear out their case. The same vendors come back their chosen fairs year after year, often claiming the same location on the grounds for decades, and become like beloved local businesses. A bench dedicated to someone representing a temporary but annual structure would be significant for exploration — provided they can prove the person represents such a stand and can prove the importance and longevity of a stand that doesn’t have a permanent structures.

Last, on the topic of the Grange Fair benches specifically: they are only semi-permanent. Unless they are honoring a significant person who was tied to a specific location of the fairgrounds, the benches may be moved around from year to year.

They’re not affixed to the ground, just quite heavy. I once watched one of my cousins pick up the corner of one and turn it to better talk to his friends. (He did move it back, but once the general population of young farmers figure out they can lift them, there will be anarchy. :cold_sweat: )


In my personal opinion, I don’t really think any benches on the Grange Fair grounds should be waypoints. They sold them to anyone and everyone to the point that they’re meaningless. I don’t think there is a single bench on the grounds anymore that wasn’t sponsored like that.

However, I do have skin in the game: I started nominating non-bench waypoints explicitly out of spite because of the 4 waypoints in Pokemon Go prior to this fair, 2 were particularly meaningless benches.

There is a Pokemon Go Gym on a bench that’s an ad right next to the hugely important extremely expensive horse arena that all us non-horse-people loathe. And a Stop on a bench dedicated to Some Dude that mentions being next a horseshoe pitch… you know an actually interesting unique thing which most people don’t even know is there (explore) and is there to offer a space for some light exercise in the form of a game of throwing horseshoes, a game commonly played at picnics as a fun group activity (socialize).