The Lawrence County Fair may be over but the important lessons that it offers our entire community should be carried with us 365 days of the year.

Despite the ridiculous amount of rain that hit the Tri-State pretty much the entire week, most would say the fair was a tremendous success for reasons that are obvious but also others that are far less tangible.

Of course, the event provides some entertainment for the region and helps inject some revenue into the local economy, but the county fair is about far more than that.

It is about celebrating our youth, bringing our community together to enjoy a family atmosphere and instilling values such as hard work, commitment, dedication, sacrifice and perseverance into young people.

But the annual event is also about celebrating our heritage and the rural way of life that our county, and our entire nation even, was founded upon. Farming and all that goes with it laid the foundation for the country we are today.

You can certainly argue that some of the moral, social and economic decline of recent decades is in some way tied to the erosion of farming and rural living.

The county fair brings those things to the forefront for at least one week and hopefully much longer.