The Merry Whirl that Keeps Whirling

by Linda Augustine Bures

There are some things from childhood you never really leave behind. The smell of the livestock barns on a warm fair day. Dust kicked up beneath a hundred pairs of shoes. The 4-H exhibits you spent all summer getting ready. Neighbors visiting with neighbors they hadn't seen since last year's fair. Something good frying somewhere nearby. And the rides.

The Clayton County Fair has been a part of my life since birth. I was born on a farm that sits right next to the fairgrounds. So was my mother. So was my grandmother. The roots run deep.

This year, I returned to the fair with my grandchildren. When the midway rides shut down for a break, we wandered over to the fairgrounds’ permanent playground. And there it was. The old merry-go-round was still standing, still turning, and still carrying children around in circles, just as it had for generations. I couldn’t help but smile. 

It isn't shiny. It doesn't have flashing lights. There's no button to push, no motor humming underneath. Just a tall center pole, a great framework of steel, long wooden riding platforms, and bars that move back and forth when little hands grab hold. When enough children climb aboard and figure out what to do, the whole contraption begins to move. It squeaks. It rocks. It turns. It whirls.

I know that sound. Because in 1964, I was one of those children.

I watched my grandsons and several other children climbing on it, not quite understanding the mechanics of the thing. Then a lady standing next to me jumped on to show them what this magic contraption could do.

"Let me show you how," she said.

She wrapped her hands around one of those long bars and began to move it. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. And the old Whirl began to answer — slowly at first, then around it went. The children's eyes grew wide. They grabbed the bars and copied her, little arms working together, that great old machine moving just as it had all those years ago.

And I stood there watching, now 2026 I had to smile. Because I had seen this before. I had lived this before. Sixty-plus years earlier, those little hands had been mine.

There wasn't a screen telling the children what to do. No recorded voice. Nobody scanned a code for directions. One person simply knew, and she showed someone else. And that, I think, is part of why the old Whirl has kept whirling. The machine wasn't the only thing passed from one generation to the next. Someone had to remember how to make it go.

The Name in the Iron

Seeing my grandchildren on it made me curious. How old was this thing? So I looked closer. There, cast into one of the heavy metal pieces, beneath years and layers of paint, were the words: MITCHELL MFG. CO., MILWAUKEE, WIS. And a year. 1926.

Suddenly the old ride wasn't merely something I remembered from childhood. It had a history long before I ever climbed aboard. Mitchell Manufacturing made playground equipment in an era when playgrounds looked very different, including an unusual apparatus known as the Mitchell Whirl. The machine I remembered from 1964 may already have been nearly forty years old when I first wrapped my hands around those bars. And now, in 2026, another generation was doing the same thing.

There is something I still don't know. When did the Merry Whirl arrive at National? Was it purchased new in 1926? Ordered by the Agricultural Society? Brought here secondhand from somewhere else? I don't know. And I've learned that when you don't know a piece of a story, you shouldn't fill the empty space with something simply because you wish it were true. Old stories deserve the truth, too. So for now, that part remains a mystery. But I do know this: Mitchell made the apparatus. The year 1926 appears on it. I rode this same machine at National in 1964. And children are still riding it today. Somewhere between those facts are a lot of Clayton County summers. And a lot of children.

Maybe the Answer Is in a Shoebox

I've learned something else about history. It doesn't always live in museums. Sometimes it lives in shoeboxes, in old photo albums tucked into dresser drawers, in a box marked Grandma's pictures that nobody has opened in twenty years. Somewhere in Clayton County there may be a photograph from the fair in 1932. Or 1947. Or 1954. Maybe nobody in it is even riding the Whirl — maybe Grandma is standing beside a prize cow, or Grandpa is holding a ribbon. But way back there, behind them, might be a tall center pole and a wooden riding platform. One ordinary family photograph could answer a question we've been asking nearly a century later. Sometimes the important thing isn't what the photographer was pointing the camera toward. Sometimes it's what was quietly standing in the background.

Funny Thing About Going in Circles

We usually talk about going in circles as though it means we haven't gotten anywhere. I'm not so sure anymore. Sometimes you come around to the same place and discover that you are the thing that changed.

In 1964, I climbed onto that ride as a child. I wasn't thinking about generations, or history, or 1926. I was thinking about hanging on. Push. Pull. Go faster. Maybe one more time around. Then life happened. Years became decades. There were beginnings I never expected and endings I never wanted. People who came into my life, and people I had to say goodbye to. Good seasons and hard ones. And somehow, sixty-plus years passed.

Eventually the circle brought me back to National. Only this time, I wasn't sitting on the wooden platform. I was standing beside it, watching my grandchildren.

I wonder if perhaps that's what generations are supposed to do for one another. Not control the ride. Not ride it for them. Simply climb aboard for a moment and say: Here. Let me show you what I've learned. Then make room for their hands on the bars.

The Merry Whirl Keeps Whirling

Maybe that's why this old machine matters to me now. Not because it's made from old steel. Not because somebody cast a name into its iron. Not even because the number 1926 has survived all these years. It matters because people passed through it. Children climbed aboard. They laughed. They learned. They grew up. Some stayed in Clayton County. Some moved far away. They became farmers and teachers, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Some of them are no longer here. But once, on a summer day in National, Iowa, they were simply children hanging onto those bars and going around one more time.

And now there are new little hands holding them. Perhaps someday my grandchildren will stand beside that old Whirl and watch another child try unsuccessfully to make it move. And maybe they'll smile. Maybe they'll climb aboard. And perhaps they'll say the same five words: "Let me show you how." Then they'll grab the bars. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. And around it will go.

Because maybe going around in circles doesn't always mean we haven't gotten anywhere. Sometimes it means something worth keeping has made it all the way around.

The children grew up. The fair changed. Generations came and went. But there at National, the old Mitchell kept doing what it had been built to do. Whirl.

And nearly a century later, the Merry Whirl keeps whirling.