Right now, on the grounds at Great Meadow in The Plains, the Virginia Scottish Games and Festival is closing out its second and final day. Bagpipe bands are packing up. Someone is coiling extension cords near a caber that got tossed one last time. A few miles away in Warrenton, the 127th Annual Warrenton Horse Show is finishing its own run, the one that always lands over Labor Day weekend and always ends the same way, with fox hunting teams competing for top honors on Hunt Night. Two events, same weekend, same county, and neither one is new. The horse show has been doing this since long before anyone alive today was born. The games have simply found a reliable slot on a field built for something else entirely.
That contrast, continuity in one place and adaptation in another, turns out to be the most useful lens for reading Fauquier County's fall calendar. Skip the Main Street version of this story, the one built around farmers markets and festival banners in downtown Warrenton, because that ground has been covered. Head instead to the crossroads and villages that ring the county, and a pattern emerges that no listicle of "fall things to do" will point out: some of Fauquier's best-known fall gatherings happen on land that used to be something else completely, while others happen because the people running them refused to let anything change at all.
The Weekend the County Just Wrapped
Start with what just happened, because it sets the terms. The Virginia Scottish Games and Festival, one of the most established Celtic celebrations on the East Coast, took over Great Meadow this weekend for its September 5 and 6 gathering. Great Meadow is, at its core, a steeplechase and equestrian venue, the same grounds that host the Virginia Gold Cup each spring. Nobody built it for Highland athletics. The Scottish Games simply rented the field, the same way a dozen other events do across the calendar year, because Great Meadow's whole business model is hosting things on top of a use that never changed.
The Warrenton Horse Show works differently. Designated a Heritage Horse Show by the US Equestrian Federation, it is a genuine Labor Day institution, drawing horses, riders, and trainers from across Fauquier and the wider Virginia Piedmont. This year's edition added a new Young Horse Festival to open the week, but the closing ritual, WHS Hunt Night, where fox hunting teams from the region compete for top honors, is exactly the tradition it has always been. Nothing here got reinvented for foot traffic or Instagram. It persisted because the horse culture that built it never left.
Ten Miles Northeast, a Different Kind of Survival
Drive northeast out of Warrenton and you hit Vint Hill, and Vint Hill tells the opposite story. This was, for more than fifty years, one of the most secretive pieces of ground in Fauquier County. The Army's Signal Intelligence Service established Vint Hill Farms Station in 1942 as a wartime listening post, and it grew into a Cold War signals intelligence and electronic warfare facility that stayed classified for decades. The Army closed it in 1997, and by 1999 the land, more than 700 acres of it, sold for $925,000 to the local economic development authority tasked with figuring out what a decommissioned spy base becomes next.
The answer, over the following two decades, turned out to be almost everything. The site now hosts engineering and technology firms, two FAA air traffic control facilities, a dance school, a gymnastics academy, an axe-throwing pub, and the Cold War Museum, which occupies a two-story building once used for supply operations. Fauquier County's Board of Supervisors approved a special exception in recent years that lets a private developer use federal and state historic tax credits to convert the old barracks, the largest surviving cluster of buildings on the property, into 183 upscale but affordable apartment units.
Old Bust Head Brewing Company sits inside this same footprint, and its annual Harvest Festival, typically staged later in September as the brewery's seasonal centerpiece, is where the county's two survival strategies collide most visibly. Guests wander a pick-your-own pumpkin patch and paint gourds with a local artist while sipping a beer brewed on ground where cryptanalysts once decoded enemy transmissions. The petting zoo and craft vendor tables are the reinvention. The land underneath them is the history that made the reinvention possible in the first place.
A half dozen separate development groups walked away from the Vint Hill barracks in the years after the base closed, each one deciding the numbers didn't pencil out. It took a different owner, a new set of historic tax credits, and roughly a decade of patience before a workable version of the project finally emerged.
Bealeton Found Its Own Version
Messick's Farm Market in Bealeton followed a quieter version of the same arc. It is still, at its foundation, a family-owned and operated farm market, the kind of operation that has always sold what it grows. What changed is the addition of a second business layered on top of the first: an agritourism draw built around a corn maze, hayrides, a barrel train, a zipline, and pumpkin painting, running on weekends from late September into October. Frozen custard and local wine, beer, and cider round out the offering for adults. None of it replaced the actual farm market. It sits alongside it, the same way Old Bust Head's tasting room sits alongside a former Army installation, a working operation with a second act stapled onto its original purpose rather than substituted for it.
Hume Never Needed a Second Act
Then there is Hume, and Hume is the counterargument to all of it. At Leeds Ruritan Park, the Leeds Ruritan Club has run its jousting competition and community day for fifty years, a tradition that predates almost every other event on this list by decades and has never been repackaged, rebranded, or built around a new business model. The format has stayed simple the whole time: a jousting tournament at the center of the afternoon, an apple pie contest offering cash prizes up to fifty dollars, more than twenty local vendors, a pork barbecue lunch, games for kids, and raffles. Every dollar raised funds scholarships for graduating seniors at Fauquier County schools. There is no adaptive reuse story here, no historic tax credit, no pivot from one purpose to another. Hume Day survives because a Ruritan club kept showing up and doing the same thing, year after year, for half a century.
What This Month Actually Looks Like
Pulling the county's early fall calendar into one place, the fixed points run roughly like this:
- Great Meadow in The Plains hosts the Virginia Scottish Games and Festival each September, layered onto its year-round life as a steeplechase and equestrian venue.
- The Warrenton Horse Show closes its Labor Day run with Hunt Night, a tradition that predates most of the county's newer attractions by generations.
- Leeds Ruritan Park in Hume holds its jousting tournament and community day, typically in early-to-mid September, funding local scholarships the same way it always has.
- Old Bust Head Brewing Company, on the former Vint Hill Farms Station grounds, runs its Harvest Festival later in the month, complete with a pick-your-own pumpkin patch and a new seasonal beer release.
- Messick's Farm Market in Bealeton opens its fall agritourism season on weekends from late September through mid-October, corn maze and all.
Two Playbooks, One County
None of these places borrowed from each other. Vint Hill didn't look at Hume and decide to reinvent itself, and Hume certainly never felt pressure to add a brewery. But laid side by side, they explain something about how Fauquier County actually works that a straightforward events roundup would miss. Some ground here changes its purpose entirely and thrives because of it. Other ground refuses to change at all and thrives for the opposite reason. Knowing which is which, before you show up on a Saturday afternoon, tells you more about what kind of day you're walking into than any festival flyer will.
That same instinct, understanding what a piece of land used to be and what it has become, is the same one that matters when you're looking at property in this county rather than just visiting it for an afternoon. Allen Real Estate has spent more than three decades reading Fauquier County property this way, tracing what a parcel or a building was built for against what it's actually being used for now. If that kind of local read is ever useful to you beyond a weekend outing, reach out. Contact Us.
