Every October, Wardsboro puts a peculiar, pale-skinned root vegetable on display and calls it civic pride. The Gilfeather turnip has been the town's calling card since a handful of local schoolkids spent two years lobbying the statehouse, and on July 1, 2016, Vermont made it official: the state's only designated vegetable. This year's Gilfeather Turnip Festival runs Saturday, October 24, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., its 24th consecutive year. Everyone in town already knows the date. Half the state does too.
What almost nobody outside Wardsboro is tracking is the other thing happening on the calendar this same stretch of weeks: a resident-driven process that will decide what the town actually prioritizes for the next several years. It started quietly on September 17, and it asks something the turnip festival never has. It asks you to show up and argue about what Wardsboro should become.
A Festival That Runs on Muscle Memory
The turnip festival is easy to love because it requires nothing from anyone. You drive to the Wardsboro Country Store, you pay a suggested parking donation, you look at turnips, you go home. The event has run for nearly a quarter century off the same formula, and that's precisely the point. It's a tradition performing itself. Wardsboro sits inside the Green Mountain National Forest, tucked between Mount Snow and Stratton, and for one Saturday a year it gets to be the answer to "what's a fun fall day trip in southern Vermont" instead of just the town you pass through on Route 100. That's a fine thing for a town to be. It's just not the thing that determines what Wardsboro looks like in five years.
Three Meetings That Will Outlast the Turnip
On the same evening the leaves were just starting to turn, Wardsboro residents gathered at Town Hall and the Methodist Church for a free community dinner that kicked off something called "Wardsboro Turns Up." It's a three-month community visit process run in partnership with the Vermont Council on Rural Development, a nonprofit that has facilitated similar work in more than 100 Vermont towns. The structure is deliberately sequential. The September 17 session was for brainstorming, an open floor for whatever residents think the town is missing or doing well. The next session, October 15, is where those ideas get narrowed into actual priorities. The final session, November 5, is where residents form task force groups and start building action plans with help from outside experts and resource providers.
That's not a listening tour. That's a town deciding, out loud, what it's going to spend its next few years on.
Alyssa Johnson, VCRD's Community Visit Program Director, put it plainly when the process launched:
"This process is an exciting opportunity for the Wardsboro community to come together to shape the future of their town."
If you missed the September 17 dinner, the process hasn't closed to you. The remaining sessions are still ahead, and there's a standing option for people who can't make it in person:
- October 15 — priority-setting session, in person at Town Hall
- November 5 — action-planning session and task force formation
- A parallel Zoom forum covering all four discussion topics, for residents who can't attend either meeting in person
- An online survey for anyone who wants to weigh in without attending a meeting at all
The organizers have also removed some of the usual friction that keeps rural civic process thin. Childcare is provided at the library during the forums. Anyone without a ride can call a resident volunteer directly. Interpretation and other accommodations are available by request. That level of removed friction is unusual for a town meeting, and it tells you the organizers expect this to matter to more than the handful of people who always show up.
The Same Six Weeks, Two Different Kinds of Attention
Line the dates up and the contrast gets sharper. September 17 was the opening dinner. October 15 is the priority-setting session. October 24, one week later, is the turnip festival. November 5 closes the planning process. All of it lands inside the same six-and-a-half-week window, which means Wardsboro residents are being asked, almost simultaneously, to show up for a tradition that costs them nothing and to show up for a process that costs them an evening and an opinion.
Attendance at long-running local festivals tends to be durable. Attendance at three-part civic planning processes tends to fall off fast between session one and session three, especially in a town this size. That drop-off isn't a criticism of Wardsboro. It's just what happens almost everywhere when a process demands three separate commitments over three separate months instead of one. The interesting question isn't whether the turnip festival will outdraw the October 15 meeting. It almost certainly will. The interesting question is what gets decided by whoever's left in the room in November, and whether that group actually represents what the wider town wants or just who had a free Thursday evening three times in a row.
That's exactly why the online survey and the Zoom option matter more than they might look on paper. They're the mechanism for the town to hear from people who care about where Wardsboro is headed but can't restructure a Thursday evening three separate times to say so.
Why This Beats the Festival as the Real Fall Story
The Gilfeather turnip is a genuinely good story, and Wardsboro should keep telling it. But a festival that's run the same way for 24 years isn't where a town's character gets written. It's where a town's character gets displayed once it's already settled. The Wardsboro Turns Up process is the opposite. It's unresolved, it's live, and the priorities that come out of the October 15 and November 5 sessions will shape everything from how the town thinks about its village centers in Wardsboro Center, West Wardsboro, and South Wardsboro to what kind of investment or infrastructure conversations get traction going forward.
If you live here and you've only got the turnip festival on your calendar, you've got the visible half of Wardsboro's fall and missed the half that's actually being written right now.
Put Both on the Calendar, in the Right Order
Go to the turnip festival on October 24. It's a genuinely good tradition and the Wardsboro Country Store is worth the stop on its own. But if you only have room for one commitment this fall, make it October 15 or November 5, or at minimum fill out the survey at bit.ly/WardsboroTurnsUp before the process closes. The Vermont Council on Rural Development has run this exact process in dozens of towns, and the towns that get the most out of it are the ones where the room in November looks like the town, not just the room that happened to show up in September.
Wardsboro's turnip will still be here next October regardless of who's in the room this fall. The priorities the town sets in the next six weeks might not be.
Curious how towns like Wardsboro fit into the broader rhythm of life across southern Vermont, from village calendars to what's actually changing on the ground? Lauren Niles keeps a close eye on both, and welcomes a conversation anytime you're ready. Schedule a Personal Consultation.
