For three decades, the first full weekend of October has meant the same thing in Wayne, West Virginia: the streets around the county courthouse fill up, the vendors set out their booths, and the town swells with neighbors, visitors, and performers from across the Tri-State. This year the Town of Wayne Fall Festival reaches its 30th anniversary, running Friday, Oct. 9 and Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, beside the Wayne County Courthouse at 700 Hendricks St.
Mayor James Jr. Ramey III, who started the festival, is expecting the biggest edition yet. "We're bringing back the gospel, bluegrass (music); we're bringing in wrestling; we'll have the parade; we have probably close to 100 if not 100 plus vendors, so this might be the biggest Fall Festival the Town of Wayne's ever had," he said.
The festival did not start out with that name. When Ramey started it in 1996, it was called "Homecoming" — a name that says a lot about what the event was meant to be. In a county seat whose identity has always been tied to the courthouse square, the festival was conceived less as a commercial draw than as a reunion, a chance for people who had moved away to come back to the hill where the town began.
That hill has a long memory. Wayne County was carved out of western Cabell County by an act of the Virginia state legislature in 1842, and named for Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The legislature chose the property of Abraham Trout, who owned a 500-acre farm in the heart of the county, as the county seat. The community that grew up around the courthouse went by several names over the decades — Trout's Hill, Wayne Court House, and, after the name Fairview was introduced in 1860, Fairview. None of them fully stuck. Locals kept calling it Wayne Court House, and in 1911 the town was renamed simply Wayne. It has been Wayne ever since.
By the time Ramey and others started Homecoming in 1996, the town had weathered the same economic currents that reshaped much of southern West Virginia. The festival became a fixture anyway, growing year over year into the gathering that now draws vendors and performers into downtown each fall. The name eventually changed to the Fall Festival, but the homecoming spirit never really left.
This year's lineup reflects the festival's eclectic, community-first character. Gospel and bluegrass music will fill the square — genres that run deep in this corner of Appalachia — and organizers have added wrestling to the bill, an unusual pairing that fits the festival's anything-for-the-community approach. Children will have ten inflatables to play on, rented by the town as a deliberate alternative to the pay-per-ride attractions that can strain a family's budget.
That decision is central to how Ramey and the town council think about the event. "Aside from any money that people choose to spend with the vendors," Ramey said, participating in the Fall Festival activities is free to festivalgoers through the town's sponsorship. The idea, he explained, is to free up families' money so they can spend it at the vendor booths instead of on rides. This year the Wayne Town Council approved up to $5,000 to support the Fall Festival parade and the Christmas parade, up from the up to $3,000 it approved the year before.
Most activities are expected to run both Friday and Saturday, but the parade has its own slot: Saturday, Oct. 10, starting at 11 a.m. Wayne Parade Committee member MJ Fosson has posted updates on Facebook noting that the parade will feature Grammy Z, a YouTube educational content creator, along with a Dolly Parton dress-up contest. "We're just trying to make this year extra special because it is the Fall Festival's 30th anniversary," Fosson said.
The Dolly Parton theme is the kind of quirky touch that has come to define the weekend. It sits comfortably alongside the gospel choirs and the wrestling ring, a mix that would look strange on a corporate event calendar but makes perfect sense in a town where the courthouse square has hosted everything from Civil War-era militia musters to three decades of fall homecomings.
Ramey himself is a returning figure in town politics. After a 15-year absence from the mayor's office, he came back to lead Wayne, telling WCHS that he had missed the job. Since returning, he has pushed an ambitious revitalization agenda — a new town color scheme of red, black, and white matching the local school mascot, the Pioneers; plans for a splash park, tennis and pickleball courts, a new playground and park beside town hall; a welcome sign at the red light coming into town; and the acquisition of the former Walgreens building across from town hall for use as an annex. The Fall Festival, in that context, is less a one-off celebration than a statement about what the town wants to be.
For visitors, the practical details are simple. The festival is free to attend, with the only costs being whatever attendees choose to spend at the roughly 100 vendor booths. It runs Friday and Saturday, Oct. 9–10, beside the Wayne County Courthouse at 700 Hendricks St. in Wayne. The parade steps off Saturday at 11 a.m. Additional information and schedule updates are available through the Town of Wayne as the festival approaches.
Thirty years after a small group of residents decided their town needed a homecoming, the event has become exactly that — an annual reunion on the same hill Abraham Trout's farm once occupied, now loud with bluegrass, gospel, and the occasional Dolly Parton lookalike.