On a Saturday morning in September, Page Avenue smells like kettle corn and cut basil before nine o'clock. About forty-five vendors set up folding tables under identical white canopies, the same rotation that has shown up most Saturdays since May. A woman buys dahlias from the flower stand two booths from the honey guy. A leashed dog naps under a picnic table while its owner debates peaches. Nobody here is thinking about October.
That is worth sitting with, because October is exactly what Old Town Fairfax has been thinking about all year. On Saturday, October 10, the City of Fairfax Fall Festival turns 50. It will fill Old Town Square from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with more than 400 art, craft, food, and gourmet vendors, three stages of live music, and beer gardens, all free to attend. Fifty years is a real number for a community event, and the city expects a bigger crowd than usual because of it. Street closures around Old Town are already the plan, not the risk.
But the festival is one day. The farmers market on Page Avenue is not, and neither are the two other recurring markets that fill Old Town's calendar without a press release. Put the four side by side and the anniversary starts to look less like the neighborhood's defining event and more like its most photogenic outlier.
The Count That Actually Describes Old Town
Here is what the 2026 calendar looks like when you count the actual dates instead of the one everyone is talking about.
| Event | Frequency | Season | Days in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fairfax Saturday Farmers' Market | Every Saturday | May 9 – Oct 31 | 26 |
| Fairfax Funky Flea | Last Saturday of the month | April – November | 8 |
| Fairfax Main St. Market | First Sunday of the month | April – December | 9 |
| City of Fairfax Fall Festival | One Saturday | October 10 | 1 |
Add the recurring markets together and Old Town stages something on at least thirty-seven separate Saturdays and Sundays this year. The festival, even in its milestone year, is one day out of that count. A downtown that could only fill Old Town Square once a year would be a nice story for a weekend. A downtown that fills a farmers market lot 26 times, a flea market lot 8 times, and three Main Street storefronts 9 times is a different kind of claim, and it's the one the calendar actually supports.
Fifty Years Is the Anomaly, Not the Rule
None of this diminishes what October 10 represents. The Fall Festival started as a small market for local artisans and has grown into the kind of event that pulls visitors from well outside Fairfax City, and a 50th anniversary is the sort of thing a downtown earns rather than schedules. The scale is exactly why it only happens once. You cannot close streets, run three stages, and host 400 vendors every weekend without the event stopping being special.
That scarcity is the point. The festival works precisely because it is not the norm. It borrows Old Town's infrastructure, its free garages, its walkable block between Chain Bridge Road and University Drive, its parking that the Old Town Fairfax Business Association already maintains for a normal Saturday, and turns the volume up for one day. Everything the festival needs already exists on a smaller scale most weeks of the year. That's the part a one-day write-up tends to skip.
What Doesn't Wait for October to Show Up
The turnover on Main Street and University Drive runs on its own schedule, and it has nothing to do with festival season. As Patch reported, Common Culture Specialty Coffee & Brunch Cafe opened last fall at 3955 Chain Bridge Road, taking over the space that had been The Commons Fooderie. Fairfax City officials cut the ribbon alongside owner Alex Kim, and Mayor Catherine Read specifically pointed to the outdoor seating Kim added to the plaza. It is a feature of the plaza apart from the one-day festival.
A few doors down on University Drive, Mackenzie's Tunes & Tonics runs as a speakeasy-inspired cocktail bar and live music venue next to The Wine House, in a building with a 500-spot covered garage built to handle ordinary weeknight demand, not festival traffic. Around the corner, Kelly's Oyster House opened in spring 2024 under owner Bill Hamrock, a sister restaurant to Hamrock's, which occupies the Moore-McCandlish House, a building that has stood on Main Street since 1842. That house predates the festival by more than a century. It has outlasted plenty of one-day events by simply staying open on ordinary Tuesdays.
These businesses are part of Old Town beyond October, adding to the everyday mix between festival days.
The Institutions With the Rankings to Prove It
The Fairfax Saturday Farmers' Market isn't just busy, it's ranked. The Washington Business Journal has placed it among the top ten markets in the DC area, and Virginia Living Magazine put it in the state's top three. That's a credential earned across 26 Saturdays a season, not a single afternoon.
The other two markets carry their own specifics worth knowing if you actually live here:
- Fairfax Funky Flea runs the last Saturday of the month, April through November, at 4031 University Drive behind United Bank, privately run by Sharon Buttram and Kathy Hackshaw with support from the Old Town Fairfax Business Association.
- Fairfax Main St. Market runs the first Sunday of the month, April through December, with vendors along the sidewalks and inside three host shops: Mode on Main by Mara, Lucy Loves, and Perfect Mistakes.
Stack those credentials against the festival's own numbers and the comparison gets interesting. The festival draws its size from being rare. The farmers market draws its ranking from being reliable. Both are real achievements, but they're not the same achievement, and a neighborhood guide that only covers the first one is missing the half of Old Town that a resident actually uses on a random Tuesday.
How to Actually Use the Fall Calendar
If you live in or near Old Town Fairfax, the practical move is to treat October 10 as the one day you plan around, not the day that defines the season. Go early, park in one of the free garages the Old Town Fairfax Business Association maintains, and expect the anniversary crowd the city itself is anticipating.
Then treat the other Saturdays as the default. The farmers market runs through October 31, so there are still several weekends left this fall to walk Page Avenue before the season closes. The Funky Flea has one more date on the calendar in November. The Main St. Market keeps going through December. None of it requires street closures or a festival map. It just requires showing up on an ordinary weekend, the way Old Town is scheduled to do across 26 Saturdays this year.
That's the real story behind the 50th anniversary. Not that Old Town Fairfax can pull off one enormous day, but that it never needed to. The neighborhood's calendar includes activity on 36 other days this year, and it will prove it again next Saturday.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood's day-to-day rhythm actually means for buying or selling a home nearby, the Sheehan Team brings the same close attention to Fairfax and the rest of Northern Virginia that we bring to reading a market calendar. Work With Us when you're ready to talk specifics.
