Ask a longtime McLoud resident what the town's one big weekend is, and most will say the same thing without thinking twice: the Blackberry Festival. Three days in June, the longest-running food festival in Oklahoma, a crowd that has swelled from 2,000 people to as many as 30,000. For decades that was the calculus. One festival, one weekend, and the rest of the year the park sat quiet.
That math changed last year, and this October, anyone driving past Veterans Memorial Park is about to see it again.
The ground that used to earn its keep once a year
The Blackberry Festival outgrew its old footprint enough that the city, with funding approved by Pottawatomie County Commissioners, finished new permanent festival grounds inside Veterans Memorial Park in time for the 2025 event. This year's edition, held June 18 through 20, ran on that same new ground and pulled from a crowd that has grown as large as 30,000, up from roughly 2,000 in the festival's earlier years. That's not a small project for a town this size. It means graded space, infrastructure for vendors and stages, room built to hold a crowd fifteen times larger than the one the festival started with.
Infrastructure like that is expensive to build and expensive to justify if it only gets used one weekend out of fifty-two. Somewhere in the planning, McLoud seems to have landed on the obvious answer: use the park twice.
Fall Fest lands inside that same Veterans Memorial Park on Sunday, October 11. Live music, food trucks, craft vendors, a tractor show, a pumpkin stand, and a beer garden tent where you can watch a football game while the kids run through the inflatables. It's a smaller crowd than Blackberry weekend, no question, but it's the same park, drawing on infrastructure that wasn't built with an October festival in mind.
What actually happens on the grounds in October
Fall Fest isn't a scaled-down copy of the summer festival. It runs on its own logic, built around the shorter days and the fact that October in Oklahoma still has one foot in football season. The lineup, according to the McLoud Chamber of Commerce:
- Live local musicians on an outdoor stage
- A tractor show, a nod to the county's working farms
- Free inflatables and face painting for kids
- A pumpkin stand
- A beer garden tent set up specifically so adults can watch a game while everyone else plays
None of that requires the scale of Blackberry weekend. What it requires is a permanent site that doesn't have to be built from scratch every time the calendar turns. That's the part that's new.
The trail that makes the park worth a Tuesday visit, not just a festival Saturday
The festival grounds get the headline, but the park's southern expansion did something quieter that matters just as much for anyone who lives nearby. The Lawrence Wahpepah Walking Trails run through that stretch of Veterans Park, past ponds and tree cover, open on any day of the week, not just the two the chamber puts on the calendar.
That distinction is worth sitting with. A festival ground is only useful on festival days. A walking trail is useful on the Tuesday after, and the Saturday before, and every ordinary afternoon in between. McLoud didn't just build a bigger stage. It built a park that has a reason to be visited fifty weeks a year, not two.
Downtown is running the same experiment on Main Street
The park isn't the only place in town stretching a single event into a season. Downtown McLoud runs its own version of the same shift, just with sidewalks instead of festival grounds.
As the weather turns, the Fall Y'all Show sets up along the sidewalks in front of Hudson Place, with local makers selling handmade crafts and a food truck parked nearby to keep the afternoon fed. It's a smaller, quieter event than anything at the park, the kind of thing you find out about because you drove downtown for coffee and noticed the tables.
Then, on Saturday, December 5, downtown does it again at a different scale for Shop the Block and the Tree Lighting Ceremony. Businesses stay open late, pop-up vendors line the block, and families get free photos with Santa while the town leans into the holiday shopping season on purpose, with a "shop small" message baked into the event itself.
Between Oklahoma Street Coffee, Fawn and Fox Books, and McLoud Mercantile, downtown already has enough independent storefronts to make a Saturday errand run feel like an actual outing. The chamber's fall and winter events are less about creating new foot traffic from nothing and more about giving people a reason to make the trip they'd already consider making.
A fall calendar, mapped
| Event | Date | Location | What's there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blackberry Festival | June 18-20, 2026 | New festival grounds, Veterans Park | The original, now the state's largest food festival at up to 30,000 attendees |
| Fall Y'all Show | Autumn, date varies | Downtown, in front of Hudson Place | Sidewalk craft vendors, food truck, vintage and upcycled goods |
| Fall Fest | Sunday, October 11, 2026 | Veterans Park festival grounds | Live music, tractor show, beer garden, pumpkin stand |
| Shop the Block & Tree Lighting | Saturday, December 5, 2026 | Downtown | Extended shopping hours, pop-up vendors, photos with Santa |
Four events, four months, and only one plot of ground doing double duty. That's the part worth noticing if you've lived here long enough to remember when the festival grounds project was still just a plan on a city council agenda.
The part that's happening this month, not next year
If you want proof this is a pattern and not a one-off, look at what's happening at the park right now. According to the city's own update, the park's next round of permanent additions was slated for construction starting in mid-September, on the heels of a summer that already saw the Pioneer Library System and McLoud Public Library run a full slate of programs there, including a mobile dairy event that turned into one of the season's highlights.
That's not festival infrastructure. That's the kind of thing that gets used on a random Wednesday afternoon by a family with nowhere particular to be. It's the same logic as the walking trail: build something that earns its keep on the days nothing is scheduled, not just the handful of weekends a year the chamber puts on a poster.
Why this is worth knowing if you already live here
None of this changes anything about buying or selling a house in McLoud. It changes how you plan a Saturday, and it says something about the direction the town is quietly moving in. A community that spends festival money on permanent infrastructure, and then figures out how to use that infrastructure in a second season, is a community investing past the next fiscal year.
For 30 years, Premier Realty, LLC has watched towns across Lincoln and Pottawatomie County make decisions like this one, and the pattern holds: the towns that build things meant to outlast a single weekend are usually the ones still worth paying attention to five years later.
If you've got questions about what's happening in McLoud, Shawnee, or anywhere else across Pottawatomie County, or you just want to talk to someone who's been paying attention to this part of Oklahoma for a long time, reach out to Premier Realty, LLC. We're neighbors first.
