Tomorrow morning, a steam whistle you have not heard in Lebanon before will echo off the brick storefronts on Broadway. Two working steam locomotives, Jeddo Coal Company No. 85 and Little River Railroad No. 1, will pull excursion cars out of the depot at 16 East South Street for the Lebanon Train Fest on September 12 and 13. Railfan & Railroad Magazine reports it may be the first time two steam engines have run together in Lebanon in more than a century.
That is one milestone. Twenty-nine days later, on the other end of Broadway, Lebanon's oldest business closes out the same stretch with a milestone of its own: the Golden Lamb marks 100 years under one family's stewardship on October 11. In between sit two of the town's other signature fall traditions, the Country Applefest and Lebanon Oktoberfest. Line up when each of these four events actually started and you get something more useful than a list of things to do. You get a rough timeline of how this downtown has paid its bills since 1803, one decade at a time.
This Weekend: A Railroad Turns 40 and Brings Two Engines to Prove It
The Lebanon Mason & Monroe Railroad has been running excursion trains out of the old depot for four decades, and the operator is marking the anniversary by bringing in two visiting steam locomotives instead of the usual one. Activities at the Train Fest are free. Ride tickets are sold separately, and the schedule runs from 10 a.m. Saturday through 4 p.m. Sunday, with vintage equipment displays, food and antique vendors, and live music filling the depot grounds between departures.
LM&M Railroad President Ray Kammer Jr. called the pairing of two steam locomotives in one town "a once-in-a-generation opportunity for railfans, families, and history enthusiasts." The railroad itself, founded in the mid-1980s, arrived a few years after the craft fair down the road at the fairgrounds and roughly three decades before the beer garden that now funds a park foundation. Three different founding decades, three different reasons to gather downtown, all still running on the same calendar.
Two Weeks Later: A Fairgrounds Tradition Older Than the Railroad
On September 26 and 27, the Warren County Fairgrounds fill with more than 300 arts, crafts, and food vendors for the Lebanon Country Applefest. Gates open at 10 a.m. both days, admission is two dollars cash at the gate, and kids twelve and under get in free. A local news report from 2023 already called it a "40-year-old tradition," which would put its founding a few years before the first excursion train ever left the depot. The craft fair economy in Lebanon predates the rail tourism economy by a few years, not the other way around, a detail that gets lost when every fall guide treats these events as interchangeable weekend options.
Applefest is run entirely by volunteers, and the organizers have said the goal has never been growth for its own sake. The money raised through gate admission goes back into the community every year, a structure that has kept the festival essentially unchanged in format for four decades while other Warren County events have scaled up, added sponsors, or moved venues entirely.
Then a Newer Model: A Beer Garden That Funds a Park
Lebanon Oktoberfest runs Friday, October 9, from 6 to 9 p.m. and Saturday, October 10, from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., set up on Mulberry Street downtown. It is the youngest recurring event of the four, now in its second decade, and it operates on a different logic than the other three. Oktoberfest is a fundraiser for the Miller Ecological Park Foundation, and since 2024 the Warren County Environmental Forum has co-hosted alongside it. German music, food vendors, a kid's zone, and local craft beer fund a park most festival visitors will never set foot in.
That is worth sitting with for a second. The Train Fest sells the railroad's own history. Applefest sells crafts and keeps its proceeds circulating locally without a stated cause. Oktoberfest sells a beer garden experience specifically to fund green space elsewhere in the county. Three different downtown events, three different economic models, all happening within Lebanon's Designated Outdoor Recreation Area, which lets attendees carry a drink from one Mulberry Street storefront to another during festival hours.
October 11: A Restaurant Marks a Century Under One Family
The last of the four anniversaries is the quietest and the oldest. On Sunday, October 11, at 3 p.m., the Golden Lamb Restaurant & Hotel on South Broadway hosts its "100 Years in the Family" celebration. The Golden Lamb itself dates to 1803, when Jonas Seaman paid four dollars for a license to run a "house of Public Entertainment" on the same lot. By its own count, 2026 marks 223 years of continuous operation, making it Ohio's longest continually running business. The hundred-year mark being celebrated this fall is narrower than that: it traces to 1926, when Robert Jones, grandfather of U.S. Senator Rob Portman, took over the Golden Lamb and spent the following year refurbishing it with Shaker furniture bought at local auctions, much of it originating from the nearby Union Village Shaker settlement.
The Golden Lamb has hosted twelve U.S. presidents over its history, along with Charles Dickens, who stopped through in 1842 and was not impressed with the coffee. Two hundred years later, the inn's hospitality has improved. What has not changed is the Broadway address, the four-story brick building rebuilt around 1815, or the fact that a single family's stewardship, by the restaurant's own framing, now spans a full century inside a building three times that age.
If you want the domestic version of this milestone, the Lebanon Farmers Market runs Thursdays from 4 to 7 p.m. through mid-October just steps from the Golden Lamb's front door, selling the same kind of locally grown produce that would have supplied Seaman's original tavern kitchen two centuries ago.
Five Weekends, One Downtown, Four Different Economies
Walk this calendar in order and you are not just attending festivals. You are moving through the layers of how Lebanon's downtown has paid its bills since 1803: hospitality and lodging first, then a volunteer-run craft fair that still funds itself the same way it always has, then a preserved railroad built to give tourists a reason to visit, and finally a newer civic model where a beer garden subsidizes a park. Every other roundup of Lebanon's fall events will tell you what is happening. Fewer will tell you that the four events landing this close together this year each trace back to a different decade of the same downtown's economic history, stacked within walking distance of each other on Broadway and Mulberry.
None of this requires a reason to move here. It requires only the willingness to be on Broadway on the right Saturday. But for those of us who spend our days looking closely at how neighborhoods like this one hold their character while everything around them changes, a fall calendar this layered is its own kind of local intelligence. It tells you which institutions this town has decided are worth keeping.
I grew up watching towns like Lebanon get flattened into a single storyline, usually "historic charm," and lose the texture underneath it. This fall is a good reminder that the texture is still there if you look for it. If you are already planning your October around these four weekends, I hope I will see you somewhere between the depot and the Golden Lamb's front steps. And if a fall walk through downtown Lebanon ever turns into a bigger conversation about buying or selling a home here, the team at Wenzler Concierge Group would be glad to help. You can schedule your complimentary concierge consultation whenever the timing is right.
