Fall Festivals & Harvest Fairs in Asheville & the Blue Ridge

Jump to this season's fall festivals events ↓

The season, in the order it happens

It opens on Labor Day weekend with the North Carolina Apple Festival filling Main Street in Hendersonville, and it runs until the last harvest supper in early November. In between, most weekends carry two or three things worth the drive. The rough order:

• Late September. Mountain Heritage Day at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, the last Saturday of the month: free, fifty-plus years running, the most honest Appalachian heritage festival in the region.
• The first weekend of October. Asheville Oktoberfest closes Coxe Avenue on the South Slope for an afternoon; walking in is free and the beer takes a tasting pass. The same weekend, the John C. Campbell Folk School Fall Festival in Brasstown puts a couple hundred craft vendors, demonstrations and two days of music on the school's grounds. It's two hours west of town and worth the whole day.
• Early October. The Cherokee Indian Fair on the Qualla Boundary: a week of stickball, agriculture, a parade and a midway, more than a century old.
• Mid-October. Waynesville's two Main Street Saturdays: the Church Street Art & Craft Show on the second, the Apple Harvest Festival on the third, put on by the Haywood County Chamber, with apples, cider and fried pies from one end of downtown to the other. Harvest festivals in the coves west of here, Stecoah Valley's among them, land on the same weekends.
• The Thursday–Sunday in mid-October. The Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands fills Harrah's Cherokee Center downtown with the Southern Highland Craft Guild's juried makers, as it does again each July. Admission is charged; kids get in free.

Apple country

Henderson County grows most of North Carolina's apples, and the orchards line Chimney Rock Road (US 64) east of Hendersonville, a half hour from downtown Asheville. U-pick runs from August through October; the apple houses keep selling cider, fried pies and bushels of late varieties into November. Go on a weekday or first thing Saturday morning. By noon on an October weekend the lots are full and the road crawls behind everybody else who had the same idea. The Apple Festival is the town's party; the orchards are the reason for it.

Corn mazes and pumpkin patches

Eliada's Corn Maze in West Asheville is the in-town one: several acres of maze, tractor rides and food trucks, open Friday through Sunday from late September to Halloween weekend. The money goes to Eliada's work with kids and families. Farther out, the Hendersonville orchards and the farms along the French Broad set up pumpkin patches and hayrides on October weekends. Halloween itself gets its own page: haunted trails, trick-or-treat streets and costume contests.

Worth knowing before you go

• Festival weekends are also leaf weekends. Mid-October is peak color on the Parkway above town (see fall color), so I-26, US 64 and the roads into Waynesville all move slowly on a Saturday. Park once and walk.
• Bring cash anyway. Most vendors take cards, but not the cider stand with no signal.
• Mountain mornings in October start in the 40s and afternoons can hit 70. Wear layers.
• Most of these are free to walk into. The Craft Fair, the Folk School and the Oktoberfest tasting pass cost money, and the cards below say so.
• Dates move a week either way from year to year. The list above is the usual pattern; the cards below have this year's dates.

Below: this season's fall festivals, harvest fairs and Oktoberfests from our calendar, each linking to its source. The ones that come back every year are at the bottom.