Raw States
Grayson Highlands Fall Festival
Mouth of Wilson, VA · Arts & Culture
- When
- September 26–27, 2026
- Where
- Grayson Highlands State Park · Mouth of Wilson · VA
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule
Grayson Highlands State Park hosts a weekend of Appalachian mountain traditions each September, with sorghum molasses making, apple butter stirred in copper kettles, and live old-time and bluegrass music. The park's wild ponies roam the balds above 5,000 feet nearby. The festival is a longtime fixture for southwest Virginia families and craft demonstrators.
The history within reach
- Grayson Highlands Fall Festivalsame spot
Grayson Highlands State Park hosts a weekend of Appalachian mountain traditions each September, with sorghum molasses making, apple butter stirred in copper kettles, and live old-time and bluegrass music.
Grayson Highlands State Park hosts a one day old time and bluegrass festival each June built around a guitar building and flatpicking competition named for luthier Wayne C.
Above five thousand feet the trees give out and Virginia turns into open grassland, kept that way by a herd of small wild ponies introduced in the 1970s to graze the balds rather than pay for mowing.
The Whitetop Mountain Sorghum Molasses Festival at the Mount Rogers Fire Hall celebrates the old Appalachian tradition of pressing sorghum cane into molasses, with old time and bluegrass music, apple butter, and craft vendors.
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.