The Saturday in Bogart That Only Happens This Year

Most years, Bogart FunFest and Washington Farms' fall opening are two separate errands. You catch FunFest on Main Street because the date happens to work, and you get out to the farm on whatever weekend the kids demand a pumpkin. They rarely land on the same Saturday, because one is a city event that moves around the calendar and the other is a six-week farm season with its own internal schedule of promotions and blackout weekends.

This year they do. Bogart FunFest runs September 26, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Main Street, and that same Saturday and the Sunday after it are two of the four dates Washington Farms has set aside for free admission for teachers and for active-duty and retired military, fire, law enforcement and EMS personnel. Miss this exact convergence and you're waiting for whatever the calendar does next year, since FunFest's date is not fixed. In 2024 it fell on September 28. In 2026 it's two days earlier.

If you live in Bogart, that's a genuinely useful thing to know before Labor Day, not after.

The Day Starts at Stripling's

Before either event opens, Stripling's General Store on Monroe Highway is already three hours into its day. The deli opens at 6 a.m. and keeps that same hour every weekday and Saturday, which makes it the obvious first stop if you're heading downtown for FunFest at 9. Stripling's has built its local reputation on sausage gravy, the kind of specific enough that it shows up by name on another Bogart menu entirely: Akademia Brewing Company lists a biscuit dish smothered in "stripling's sausage gravy" on its own food menu, a small detail that tells you something about how compact this town's food scene actually is. Two businesses on opposite sides of Bogart, one borrowing the other's name outright on a printed menu.

Nine to Four on Main Street

FunFest itself runs the length of Main Street from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., organized by the city rather than a private promoter. The lineup shifts year to year, but recent editions give a sense of the shape: the 2024 festival brought craft vendors, food trucks, funnel cakes and baked goods, a magician and balloon animals, face painting from Enchanted Events, and carnival games and bouncy houses from ExtremeFun Co. It's a walkable few hours, not an all-day commitment, which is exactly why it pairs so well with an afternoon somewhere else.

There's a second calendar quirk worth knowing about. Bogart's Historical Agricultural Building, the renovated space where the city holds council meetings, also houses the Bogart Historical Museum, which opens on the fourth Saturday of most months. September 26 is the fourth Saturday of September in 2026, which means the museum, curated by longtime Oconee County resident Patricia Greene, opens the same day as FunFest rather than some other weekend that month.

The Farm Opens the Same Weekend

Washington Farms sits at 5691 Hog Mountain Road in Bogart, and its fall season is built differently than a one-day festival. The pumpkin patch itself is free to walk through, no admission required, but the corn maze and the roughly three dozen fall activities, from the cow train to the petting zoo to the mega slide, require a separate ticket that has to be bought online in advance. Tickets sell out by time slot, and once a slot is gone online, it isn't available at the gate either. If your plan is FunFest in the morning and the farm in the afternoon, that's the detail that actually matters: buy the farm tickets before you leave the house, not after you've already spent the morning downtown.

The farm's 6.5-acre corn maze changes theme every season, and the free-admission days for teachers and for military, fire, law enforcement and EMS families this fall fall on September 19 to 20 and September 26 to 27. That second window is the one that overlaps FunFest. For a teacher or a first responder living in Bogart, that's two invitations landing on the identical Saturday rather than competing for it.

John Washington, who runs the farm with his wife Donna, has talked about what he's actually building toward on a day like that. He wants to hear, in his words, "real conversations between parents and their children, with no distractions." That's the pitch for the farm side of the day: slower, outdoors, no screens, built for lingering rather than moving through.

Ending at Akademia

By early evening, Akademia Brewing Company on Crane Drive is the natural place to close the day out. It opened in October 2017 as a full-service brewpub, the kind of place built specifically to combine food, beer and a place to sit rather than just a taproom with snacks. The menu leans into pub fare made with the house beer itself, including a beer-braised pork chop, alongside that Stripling's-inspired biscuit dish that shows up on the breakfast side of the menu. For a family that started the day with sausage gravy at 6 a.m. and ended it with a version of the same gravy on a menu across town, that's not a coincidence worth overthinking. It's just how small this particular map is.

The Actual Schedule, If You Want It

None of this requires a car with four-wheel drive or a full day off work. Main Street to Hog Mountain Road to Crane Drive is a loop of a few miles, not a road trip, which is part of why the overlap matters. When two anchor events share a date, a Bogart resident can actually string them together without the day turning into logistics.

Why This Exact Saturday Doesn't Repeat

FunFest doesn't have a fixed weekend the way, say, a school calendar does. It moved from a Saturday in late September in 2024 to a different Saturday in late September this year, set by whatever the city's calendar allows. Washington Farms' free-admission days are an annual promotion the farm sets independently, tied to its own six-week fall window rather than to any city event. There's no coordination between the two calendars. They just happen to land together this year.

That's worth sitting with if you're the kind of Bogart resident who likes routines. This isn't a new annual tradition being born. It's two long-running local fixtures that happen to share a Saturday in 2026, and there's no guarantee they'll do it again in 2027. If the pairing appeals to you, this fall is the one to actually use it.

For residents who've been in Bogart long enough to have their own version of this Saturday already mapped out, none of this is news. For everyone else, it's the kind of overlap that only shows up if you're checking both calendars at once, which most people aren't.

If you're weighing a move within Bogart, or thinking about what a bigger yard near Hog Mountain Road might mean for a fall like this one, the team at Holly Purcell Group knows this stretch of Oconee County block by block. Contact us when you're ready to talk through what's actually for sale here, and what a day like this one looks like from a specific address rather than a hypothetical.