After 92 Years, St. James Split Up Who Runs the Grape and Fall Festival

Who actually runs the Grape and Fall Festival? For as long as most people in St. James can remember, the answer has been simple: the Chamber of Commerce does. One office, one small staff, one three-day event every September that somehow also included a parade, a carnival, livestock judging, a queen pageant, and a flea market spread across downtown and Nelson Hart Park. This year the answer got more complicated, and the reason why says something about how much the festival has outgrown the people who built it.

The festival dates back to 1932, when it started as a celebration of the local grape harvest and included the town's first queen pageant, an honor given to daughters of area farmers. For most of the decades since, it stayed a volunteer operation. The Chamber didn't even have a paid employee running it until 2008. Before that, a completely volunteer board pulled the whole thing together year after year. Kelly Money, who has directed the Chamber since 2022, put it plainly when the city announced the change late last year: the Chamber can't keep running a three-day festival and treat that as its only job.

Three Jobs Instead of One

Starting with this year's festival, the work is split three ways instead of sitting on one desk.

1. The Chamber of Commerce keeps the Downtown Vendor Fair and continues its fundraising role, the piece of the event closest to its original small-business roots.
2. The City of St. James shares oversight of the broader festival, taking on responsibilities that used to fall entirely on Chamber staff.
3. The Parks and Recreation Department now handles registration and logistics for the fairgrounds side at Nelson Hart Park, including the arena events that used to run entirely through the Chamber's office.

Money described it as redefining what the Grape and Fall Festival should be. It's a shift most visitors will never notice, since the parade still steps off downtown and the carnival still fills the same park it always has. But if you're the kind of resident who volunteers a shift, enters the pie contest, or wants to know who to call about a vendor table, it now matters which door you knock on. Youth and agriculture groups like FFA and 4-H stay just as involved as always, still running their contests and exhibits under the new structure.

What Actually Happens, September 10 Through 12

The festival itself runs Thursday through Saturday, September 10 to 12, though the fairgrounds have traditionally opened a day earlier for what organizers call St. James Cares Night, a quieter preview evening set aside for seniors and guests with special needs. Rides slow down, lights dim, and the cook shacks serve food free of charge, a tradition the festival has kept even as its organizational chart changed.

Thursday night belongs to the Main Stage. Faster Horses, a 90s country mashup act, headlines at 8 p.m., the kind of booking that's become a fixture of the festival's opening night.

Friday is where the competitive streak shows up. A cornhole tournament kicks off at 6 p.m. at the Large Pavilion, double elimination, fifty dollars a team, with cash prizes for the top three finishers. Right alongside it, at 7 p.m., Team Roping returns to the arena. That event had gone missing from recent festivals, and it's back this year because of one volunteer in particular, Les Clancy Jr., who organizers specifically thanked for bringing it back.

Saturday is the busiest day by a wide margin:

• The parade steps off in the morning, judged before it heads toward Nelson Hart Park
• Exhibits and the carnival open early afternoon
• A pie-eating contest follows shortly after
• The dunking booth opens mid-afternoon
• A grape stomp, the closest thing the festival has to a signature event, happens later in the afternoon
• Wiener Dog and Small Breed Races close out the evening at 7 p.m. in the arena, an event popular enough that organizers put out a separate call for volunteers just to help run it

The Downtown Vendor Fair and flea market run all three days at Nelson Hart Park, coordinated separately by Les Clancy Sr., who's been handling vendor space at fifty dollars a spot.

The Detail on This Year's Shirt

Every year the festival sells a commemorative shirt, and most years it's just the standard purple-and-white Grape and Fall Festival design. This year there's a second option, and it's worth paying attention to because of what it says about the timing. The shirt marks Route 66's centennial and, locally, the 200th anniversary of the town's Iron Works, the industry that originally put St. James on the map before the wineries did. It's a small thing, a $28 shirt sold out of the Parks Department at City Hall, but it's the rare piece of festival merchandise that actually points at St. James history rather than just branding the event itself.

If You Want the Slower Version

Not everyone wants three days of carnival noise, and the festival's footprint gives you an easy way to step outside it without leaving town. Public House Brewing Company's St. James taproom sits right next door to St. James Winery on State Route B, and its outdoor space, called The Gardens, stays open through the fall with a fire pit, bocce courts, and a life-sized chess set. It's close enough to walk to from downtown but far enough from Nelson Hart Park that you'd never guess a carnival was running a few blocks away.

For a sit-down dinner away from festival food trucks, Sybill's Restaurant and Gift Shop operates out of a converted southern-style home just north of the interstate, complete with a porch veranda for outdoor dining and a wine list built around the area's own wineries. It's open Tuesday through Saturday, which covers all three festival nights, though it's worth knowing it closes entirely on Sundays and Mondays if you're planning a weekend around it. Closer to downtown, Los Mezcales on North Jefferson Street keeps regular weekday and Saturday hours for anyone who wants dinner without waiting in a fairgrounds line, and Country Bob's Cafe a few blocks up serves its breakfast buffet Friday and Saturday mornings for anyone catching the Saturday parade early.

What the Reorganization Actually Tells You

None of this changes what the festival looks like from a lawn chair on Saturday afternoon. The parade still runs, the grape stomp still happens, the carnival lights still go up over Nelson Hart Park. What's changed is quieter and more structural: a 92-year-old festival that used to be one department's side project now has three departments sharing the load, because the event had grown past what a Chamber of two or three people could carry alone. That's not a small admission for a town this size to make. It suggests the festival, and by extension the town hosting it, has been growing faster than its own organizational chart could keep up with.

If you've lived in St. James for a while, that's probably the more interesting story here, more interesting than another rundown of carnival hours. The festival isn't shrinking. It's being handed off to more hands because one office ran out of room to hold it.

And if watching your own town's biggest event outgrow its organizers ever gets you wondering what that kind of growth has done to your own property's value, The Closers can walk you through it. Get Your Home Valuation and see what a market that's clearly still building has done to what your address is worth.