This weekend marks the 50th Dutch Fall Festival on Aaron Square, and that number is easy to misread. Fifty years sounds like the town's oldest tradition, the deep root everything else grew from. It isn't. The festival started in 1976. The square it's held on had already hosted the largest single-day gathering in Centre County history a quarter century earlier, with a guest list that included a future Nobel Peace Prize winner and a sitting Supreme Court justice. Two very different anniversaries run through the same patch of grass this fall, and only one of them sells apple dumplings.
What's Actually on the Schedule This Weekend
The festival itself runs Saturday, October 3, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, October 4, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an outdoor church service opening Sunday morning at 9:30. Haines Township, which has hosted the event since its founding, is treating this round number as worth celebrating in its own right, with a full slate of craft, art, antique, and produce vendors filling the streets around Wert Memorial Park.
The food is the part regulars plan around: homemade bread, sticky buns, apple dumplings, apple cider, ham potpie, and soup, alongside a quilt raffle and old-time demonstrations. A Free Children's Activity Tent runs both days with face painting and take-home crafts.
The music schedule is worth writing down if you're timing a visit. Saturday opens early with Miller, Strait, and Baronner, a Central Pennsylvania string trio built around guitar, banjo, and mandolin, at 9 a.m., followed by the genre-hopping Nick Miller Project at 10:45. Centre Hall native Adam Yarger, who fronts Adam & the Armadillos and has shared stages with country acts like Craig Morgan and Colt Ford, plays at 12:30. The Chris Bell Band closes out Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. with a roots and Americana set. Sunday afternoon belongs to the Jay Vonada Quartet at 2:30, led by an Aaronsburg-based jazz trombonist who has been playing festivals, wineries, and breweries across the region since 2010.
In recent years the weekend has also included the Adult Pedal Pulls, run on Plum Street right behind the festival grounds. It's a small, unglamorous tradition, tractors and a sled and a crowd standing along a fence line, but it's the kind of thing that tells you this is still a working farm town underneath the craft tents.
The Other Anniversary Nobody's Selling Sticky Buns For
Aaronsburg's actual founding goes back further than any festival. Aaron Levy, a Philadelphia land speculator, laid out the village in 1786 on 334 acres he'd purchased seven years earlier, land then known as White Thorn Grove and home to roughly twenty families. Levy hoped the town might become a future county seat, which is why he gave it an unusually wide main street, laid out deliberately, in his words, to facilitate public discourse on governmental matters. That street is Aaron Square today, the same ground the festival occupies every October.
Levy was Jewish, settling among German Protestant farmers, and in 1799 he gave two lots and a pewter communion set to the newly formed Salem Lutheran Church as a gesture of goodwill. The gift stuck in local memory long enough that in 1949, a Pennsylvania state official named Arthur Lewis heard the story on a visit through town and decided it deserved a wider audience.
What Lewis organized became known as The Aaronsburg Story, a day-long pageant held on October 23, 1949, five years after the end of World War II and framed explicitly around religious and racial tolerance. Estimates of the crowd that showed up range from 30,000 to 40,000 people, a scale that dwarfs anything the modern festival draws and would be difficult to fit into the village even today. The speaker list included Ralph Bunche, then a United Nations mediator who would win the Nobel Peace Prize the following year for his work on the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, and Felix Frankfurter, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Bunche's message that day was direct: "There is but one road to peace and that is the road of human understanding."
Cornel Wilde narrated an afternoon pageant accompanied by Penn State's Blue Band, with more than a thousand costumed townspeople acting out the town's history. Four years later, organizers staged a follow-up event, the Aaronsburg Assembly, that drew Ronald Reagan as narrator.
The 75th anniversary of the original pageant was marked two years ago, on October 26, 2024, with a separate commemoration at Salem Lutheran Church organized by the Penns Valley Historical Society and the church itself, with support from Bellefonte poet and Penn State English professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf. Kevin Barron delivered Bunche's speech that day, and a Penns Valley High School student won a $500 prize for an essay on tolerance. That event isn't repeating this fall. It runs on its own clock, entirely separate from whatever number the Dutch Fall Festival counts up to next.
Same Square, Two Centuries
The wide street Levy platted for public discourse in 1786 is the reason both events could happen where they did. A village this size doesn't usually have room for a crowd in the tens of thousands, but Aaron Square was built with exactly that kind of gathering in mind, long before anyone knew what would eventually fill it.
What the festival preserves isn't the scale of 1949. It's the habit. A town platted around the idea that neighbors of different backgrounds could share a communion set and a public square still finds a reason to gather on that same ground every fall, even if the reason now involves a quilt raffle instead of a Supreme Court justice.
If You're Making a Day of It
Millheim sits close enough to fold into the same trip. The Green Drake Gallery and Arts Center, on West Main Street directly across Route 45 from Elk Creek Cafe + Aleworks, has been showing local and regional artists for more than a decade and hosts live music and studio space on the second floor. It's a natural stop before or after the festival if you're already in the area.
Cyclists in Penns Valley have paired past festival weekends with a group ride organized by Penns Valley Pedals and Pints, an 18.5-mile route called the Apple Butter Loop that winds through Haines Township before circling back into town in time for the festival crowds and, appropriately, the apple dumplings waiting at the finish.
Whatever brings you to Aaron Square this weekend, the ground under the vendor tents has carried a bigger crowd than this one. It's still doing the same job it was built for two hundred and forty years ago.
If you're out at the festival this weekend, we'd love to say hello. And if you're ever curious what a house near Aaron Square or anywhere else in Penns Valley might be worth, the team at Annette Yorks Group is always glad to talk it through.
