Raw States
Chilhowie Community Apple Festival
Chilhowie, VA · Food & Drink
- When
- September 25–27, 2026
- Where
- Lucas B. Dowell Memorial Park · Chilhowie · VA
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule
Chilhowie's Community Apple Festival has run for more than seventy years in this small Smyth County town at the foot of the Blue Ridge. Lucas B. Dowell Memorial Park fills with a car show, parade, crafts, and apple butter cooked outdoors in big copper kettles. It is one of the oldest continuously running harvest festivals in southwest Virginia.
The history within reach
- Chilhowie Community Apple Festivalsame spot
Chilhowie's Community Apple Festival has run for more than seventy years in this small Smyth County town at the foot of the Blue Ridge.
Brine wells here made the salt that kept Confederate meat from rotting, which made a village of a few hundred people a target worth two battles and a Union raid in December 1864 that finally wrecked the works.
The name and the first version came out of Knoxville, but the drink America knows was reformulated at the Tip Corporation in Marion in 1958, where Bill Bridgforth built the citrus recipe that Pepsi bought outright six years later.
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One of the six parks the Civilian Conservation Corps built to open Virginia's state park system on a single day in 1936, its lake and stone lodges still doing the job.