Madison Lambert crowned Miss Tri-County Fair Queen in Marvell

Madison Lambert left Monday night’s Tri-County Fair Queen Pageant with the top title and the People’s Choice honor, giving Marvell an early lift as the Tri-County Fair opened in Phillips County. The five-day fair ran from Tuesday, May 26 through Saturday, May 30 at the Tri-County Fairgrounds, and the pageant helped set the tone for a week that drew more than 5,000 fairgoers, a 53% increase over 2025.

Kinsley Helton was named Miss Junior Fair Queen, and Kailyn Hickman received Miss Congeniality, adding to a pageant lineup that highlighted young women from across the area. For families in Marvell, Phillips County, Lee County and Monroe County, the queen contest remains one of the fair’s most visible traditions, because it puts youth participation front and center before the rides, food booths and other fairweek activity take over.

The fair itself has deep local roots. It began as the Marvell Fair under first president L.P. Anderson, became the Phillips County Fair in 1952, and took the Tri-County Fair name in 1988 to reflect Phillips, Lee and Monroe counties. That history helps explain why the pageant still carries weight: it is tied to a long-running regional institution, not just a single night’s competition.

This year’s fair also marked a shift in timing. Organizers moved the annual event from a late-summer slot to May, and local promotion framed the change as the start of something new for the fair and the towns it serves. The stronger turnout suggests the move found an audience, with more than 5,000 people passing through during the five-day run and helping fill Marvell with the kind of traffic local vendors, volunteers and families notice immediately.

For Phillips County, the pageant was more than a crown being handed out. It signaled that the Tri-County Fair still has the ability to pull together students, sponsors and fairgoers around a shared county tradition, while giving Marvell a turn at the center of the region’s community calendar.