What To Know About Cohocton's 60th Fall Foliage Festival This October

Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4 mark the sixtieth year that Cohocton has closed off the Village Green for the Fall Foliage Festival. If you live here, the schedule is worth reading closely this year. The pieces that make the weekend feel like Cohocton, and not a generic county fair, sit at the edges of the map, not on Main Street.

The 60th, and why the shape of the weekend is the point

The festival began in 1966 as a community event in which the residents of Cohocton and neighboring communities gather to celebrate the surrounding hills, which puts this fall's edition at its diamond anniversary. Sixty years in, the event is one of the few in Steuben County that has held the same footprint for that long: 15 South Main Street, arts and crafts vendors, flea market, food booths, and a Sunday afternoon that clears out by supper.

The reason to pay attention this year is not that the festival is bigger. It is that a resident who only walks the main aisle of vendors is missing roughly half of what happens. The Wayland-Cohocton parking lot, the elementary school lot, and the two church kitchens are running their own programs in parallel, and most of them have been part of the weekend since before the current elementary school building existed.

The weekend at a glance

Times reflect the festival's most recently published two-day schedule. The most recently published two-day schedule for the festival's return listed vendors, a petting zoo, a parade, horse-drawn wagon rides, fireworks, and a classic car show, with the arts, crafts, antique, and flea market plus petting zoo running 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, horse-drawn wagon rides from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, a Saturday noon parade, 9 p.m. fireworks after the JV and varsity soccer games, and a Cruize'n Time classic car show 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday at Cohocton Elementary School. Confirm any timing changes with the festival directly before the weekend.

The Fruits of the Press tasting is the sleeper event

If you have lived here more than a few years, you already know the Village Green vendor rows. What tends to turn over year to year is the wine and spirits tasting, and this is where the festival quietly out-punches its size. The most recent published lineup for Fruits of the Press included Lakeland Winery of Syracuse, Main Street Winery of Arcade, Krooked Tusker Distillery of Hammondsport, Four Fights Distillery of Corning, Woodlawn Distilling of Linwood, and Engine 14 Brewery of Naples.

That is a tighter list than most Finger Lakes tasting events pull together in a village of Cohocton's size. A quick read of what each one brings if you have not tried them:

• Krooked Tusker Distillery anchors the Hammondsport end of Keuka Lake and mostly shows up in tasting rooms, not festival tents.
• Four Fights Distillery is a Corning operation, close enough that a Cohocton resident could visit the source on a weekday.
• Woodlawn Distilling out of Linwood is the least obvious drive of the group. A tent at the Village Green may be your shortest trip to their product all year.
• Engine 14 Brewery is the Naples brewery, roughly a half hour north through the hills.
• Lakeland Winery and Main Street Winery round out the wine side from Syracuse and Arcade respectively.

The tasting is coordinated by Pat and Gene Drum at 607-661-0147, and the sponsor list historically has read like a directory of who is actually still doing business here: Drum Farms, SM Logging LLC, LMC Industrial Contractors Inc., Cohocton Lions Club, Station 26, Edgewood Grain, and CVM–Cohocton Valley Mills.

The parts that happen off the Green

The festival is not what happens at the vendor booths. It is what happens at the church basements, the school parking lot, and the tractor pull, on the same weekend.

Three things worth planning around if you live in the village:

The church meals. Saturday morning starts around 7 a.m. with a homemade breakfast and bake sale from the Methodist Church, and lunch has traditionally been Beef-on-Wick hosted by the Cohocton Lions Club. The Presbyterian Church has run a Friday spaghetti dinner in past years. These are the meals that fund choir robes and roof repairs, and they clear out fastest.

The Wayland-Cohocton parking lot. The parking lot on Park Avenue is where the Tractor Pull, Antique Tractor Show, Fall Classic Antique and Vintage Snowmobile Show, and Fall Classic Car Show set up. If you have kids who care more about a 1958 John Deere than a kettle corn booth, this is where you spend the afternoon. Tractor show questions have historically gone through Doug Landis at 585-737-6385.

The Friday football and soccer. Local events like the Fall Foliage Soccer Tournament and the Wayland-Cohocton football game happen on Friday, on fields surrounded by the actual foliage that gave the festival its name. For a resident, Friday night is arguably the best window of the weekend because the vendor traffic has not arrived yet and the hills read the way you moved here to see them.

Timing your Saturday if you actually live in the village

The parade steps off at noon on Main Street. If your house sits within a few blocks of the route, plan to have any car you need out of the driveway before 11 a.m. or resign yourself to staying put until roughly 1 p.m. This is the one weekend a year when the shortcut behind the school is not a shortcut.

The fireworks time slot is the one that catches new residents off guard. They fire after the soccer games wrap, which puts them closer to 9 p.m. than the family-friendly 7:30 you might expect from a small-town festival. If you have children under six, plan around a nap or plan to skip. The best viewing is not on the Green itself. It is from any elevation south of Route 415, where the show reads against the ridge line rather than through village streetlights.

A note on parking. The elementary school lot becomes the classic car show on Sunday from 9 to 3, which means the overflow that residents normally use as a Sunday morning option is gone. Walk in if you can. The half mile from the north end of the village is honestly one of the better parts of the weekend, especially if the maples on the west side of Main Street are turning on schedule. Cohocton sits in the western part of New York in Steuben County, and this region experiences peak foliage from the end of September through mid-October, which puts the first weekend of October in the middle of the window rather than at the edge of it.

A quieter version of the weekend

If crowds are not your thing, there is a version of this festival that a lot of longtime residents run on quietly. It looks like this:

• Friday evening. Drive up Pine Hill or out toward Atlanta before dusk. The color is peaking and the traffic has not started.
• Saturday morning, 8 a.m. Methodist Church breakfast before the parade route closes. You will be seated among people who have been sitting at the same tables for the same weekend for thirty years.
• Saturday, 10 a.m.–noon. Walk the flea market before the crowds thicken. Genuine antique dealers usually anchor the north end and sell down by early afternoon.
• Skip the middle of the day. Come back for the fireworks or skip them entirely.
• Sunday, 9 a.m. Coffee, then the car show at the elementary school. The lot empties by 3 and the Green thins by 4.

That is the version residents rarely write down and out-of-town visitors never see. If you moved to Cohocton in the last few years, treat this fall as the year to try it.

Looking ahead

Sixty years is a real number for an event in a village this size. The reason the festival is still here is not the vendor list or the fireworks. It is that the Lions Club still cooks, the Drums still coordinate the wine tasting, the Methodists still open at 7 a.m., and the tractor guys still show up. If you live in Cohocton, that is a weekend worth being present for, not just around for.

When you are ready to talk about the house you own here, the one you inherited, or the one you have been circling on Zumbrota Road for two years, Justine Fox knows the streets these vendors are setting up on. Request Your Free Home Valuation to see what your Cohocton property is worth in this market.