Zeff Davis started selling peanuts at the Hillsdale County Fair when he was 4 years old.
“My grandmother had me hustling peanuts at the grandstand,” Davis said. “She always let me walk the fences and kept me close.”
Davis, an Addison, Mich., native, comes from a long line of fair vendors. His family has been selling fudge, hot dogs, corn dogs, and peanuts since the 1930s.
“When I was 17 I did not want to be behind the peanut trailer,” Davis said. “I wanted to do the corn dogs and the hot dogs. I wanted to do anything but peanuts. It must have been a guy thing, like about meeting girls while selling peanuts.”
Davis said he eventually learned to appreciate the business and the heritage it entailed.
The 52-year-old sets up shop overlooking the racetrack on a hill, where there’s been a peanut stand for over 100 years. Davis said he likes the view of the races but not so much the chilly winds.
The Hillsdale fair is merely one week’s worth of work for the vendor, who travels from county to county selling his home-roasted delicacies on the fair circuit.
Davis sells a bag of regular peanuts for $2 and the hot and spicy Cajun variety are $3 per bag. Davis roasts 25 pounds of peanuts once a day in his 1937 Royal Coffee Roaster (built to roast peanuts), which has been used by his family for almost 80 years. Davis is the only one in his family who has kept the tradition alive. No one else in his family had a passion to keep the opperation in business.
“The rest of my family totally stays away from the business,” Davis said. “It’s a very hard business, for one thing. The money’s funny. It can be very good, or it can be very bad. It’s one extreme to another, you just never know. And you’re always fighting with the weather.” Davis said. “
While Zeff continues the Davis family business, Ted Crabtree also represents an Addison legacy at the fair. Crabtree’s family has been coming to the Hillsdale County Fair since 1921, when Crabtree’s grandfather made the first trip on horse and buggy.
Crabtree brings 24 Jersey cows and several other cows to the Hillsdale County Fair every year. For the rest of the year, the Crabtrees sell their cows’ milk in Addison, where Davis and Crabtree have known each other since they were young children.
“We get a big bag (of peanuts) every Halloween,” Crabtree said. “My little boy stops by there and he gives him peanuts for Halloween.”
Crabtree, like most of Davis’s customers, prefers Davis’s original peanuts. Davis said the spicy kind are more popular among the younger crowd.
“[I like the] the plain, old, salted. The old original, those are the better ones,” Crabtree said.
Of the variety of delicacies Davis has sold over the years, he said peanuts have been the most interesting item to sell.
“They’ve been the most interesting because of the variety of people you get to meet,” Davis said. “Selling peanuts brings out different qualities of people. Lots of people ask for broiled peanuts, for example. …You see different tastes.”
Davis enjoys the opportunity to live out his childhood passion.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, is sell peanuts,” he said.
mdelp@hillsdale.edu
