Barboursville's Fall Fest Runs the Same Route Every Year. The Village Around It Just Changed.

Barboursville's Fall Fest hasn't moved in more than four decades. The parade still lines up at the middle school, the carnival still fills the same lot downtown, and the Arts & Crafts Show still spills down Central Avenue for two full days every September. What's different this year is everything standing along that route while it happens. If you walked this same stretch of Central Avenue during last year's festival, you walked past storefronts and shopping centers that hadn't opened yet. This year, they have. And the difference between the two festivals says something about how fast this village has actually been moving while everyone was watching the parade.

The Same Three Days, On Purpose

This year's Fall Fest runs September 17 through 19, with the parade set for Thursday the 17th and the Arts & Crafts Show taking over the two days that follow. The Village of Barboursville has run some version of this event for more than 40 years, and last year's festival was billed as the 44th, which puts this year at the 45th. The bones of the weekend never change: a parade that starts at the Barboursville Middle School bus garage and ends at Sadler Field on Farmdale Road, a carnival that runs the length of the celebration, and vendor booths that fill Central Avenue for anyone walking downtown on Friday and Saturday.

That consistency is the point. Fall Fest is the one weekend a year when the village stops being a drive-through corridor between Huntington and Milton and turns back into the kind of place where you park once and walk everywhere. What's worth noticing is what "everywhere" now includes.

What Wasn't Here Last September

Two names on this year's map didn't exist during last year's festival at all.

Chicken Salad Chick opened its first West Virginia location at Tanyard Station this year, a fact the franchise owner confirmed directly, and it's the kind of opening that only happens once. Last September, the retail strip out at Tanyard Station didn't have it. This September, it does.

A few minutes down Route 60, Austin's Homemade Ice Cream opened its third location this year in the former Fuel space at River Place Plaza. The shop is family owned and has operated out of Ceredo for three generations, and the new Barboursville location keeps the ice cream made there, same as always. It's a five-minute drive from the parade route, and it wasn't an option last Fall Fest either.

Neither of these changes the festival itself. What they change is the after. Last year, festival week meant the same rotation of food trucks and the same handful of downtown regulars. This year, anyone walking away from the carnival with a few hours to kill has two more real stops that weren't on the list twelve months ago.

The Corner the Parade Actually Passes

Downtown hasn't been standing still either. The parade route and vendor booths run through Central Avenue, and anyone who parks there to watch, which the village itself recommends, ends up standing close to 650 Central Avenue, home of 1861 Public House. The pub opened in 2021 in a space that used to house Eliot's Tap Room, built its menu around pizza, wings, and a rotating craft beer list, and has since added online ordering as the surrounding block filled back in.

The same owner, Jason Beter, later opened an adjacent brewery called Koerber Beer Company right next door, giving 1861 its own house-brewed beer to pour alongside the rest of its taps. Beter also owns Oscar's Breakfast, Burgers & Brews, a separate spot that went through a ten-week renovation to add a full kitchen, a longer bar, and roughly 20 more beers on tap. Between the three, downtown Barboursville has more of its own food and drink identity during festival week than it did just a few years ago, and it's the kind of identity that only shows up if you're already standing on the block.

The Booking Got Bigger, Too

Fall Fest's Saturday night headliner is usually a good read on how much the festival itself is scaling up, and this year's booking is a jump.

In 2023, Saturday night belonged to Chris Cagle, with Burning Ridge and Madhouse playing Friday. In 2025, the festival brought in Shenandoah, fresh off a performance at Rock The Country in Ashland. This year, the village announced Montgomery Gentry featuring Eddie Montgomery for Saturday, September 19, a booking one Tri-State news outlet called a major name in country music returning to the state. That's three straight years of the Saturday headliner getting bigger, and it's not the kind of thing you'd notice unless you'd been paying attention to who played the years before.

The Mall Counts As Barboursville, Too

Here's a detail that trips up even longtime residents. When Buffalo Wild Wings reopened this spring under new ownership by the Schmidt Family Restaurant Group, the news coverage ran with a Barboursville dateline, even though most people would tell you Huntington Mall reads as Huntington on a map. The new operators hired 110 team members for the relaunch and gutted the building down to the studs before reopening, according to the announcement. It's a small thing, but it's a useful reminder that the village's actual footprint runs wider than the four blocks of Central Avenue everyone pictures when they think of Fall Fest.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this changes the parade route or the carnival schedule. What it changes is what's worth doing with the rest of the week. If your Fall Fest routine has been the same for a few years, this is the year it's worth breaking it. Grab dinner at 1861 or Oscar's before the parade, since you'll already be parked two blocks away. Swing by Tanyard Station for a first taste of the state's newest Chicken Salad Chick sometime that weekend. Stop at Austin's on Route 60 East on the way home instead of driving straight past it.

Barboursville has spent the last year adding to itself quietly, a shop here, a scoop counter there, while the festival calendar stayed exactly where it's always been. Fall Fest is just the week the two finally overlap in the same three days.

If you're the kind of resident who notices when a corridor like this starts changing shape and wonders what it means for property values or timing a move down the road, Home in WV keeps close tabs on exactly this kind of shift in Barboursville and the rest of the Kanawha and Tri-State corridor. Schedule your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what it means for your own address.