On the morning of October 10, the Ringgold Colonnade fills with folding tables for a pumpkin Bake-Off and a costume contest that runs until a movie starts playing against the night sky. Ten minutes down Post Oak Road, a different crowd is already arriving at Willow Tree Farms, where the ponds and gazebos that usually host weddings are set up for a butterfly release. Same Saturday, same county, two events that have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with how Catoosa County's fall weekends actually work now.
That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a story about two festivals sharing a name and confusing people, the way it can happen elsewhere. These are unrelated events, run by different organizers, for different reasons, that simply landed on the same day because the county's fall calendar has gotten crowded enough to make that inevitable.
A Public Street Festival and a Private Farm, Same Saturday
The Ringgold Pumpkin Fest at the Colonnade runs noon to 8 p.m., a street festival built around a pumpkin Bake-Off, a costume contest, and an outdoor movie once the sun goes down. It's the kind of event a downtown puts on when it has a plaza built for exactly this: a place to close off, string lights over, and fill with folding chairs.
Willow Tree Farms is a different kind of space entirely. It's a 110-acre working farm on Post Oak Road, and it's only been an event venue since 2020. Before that it was a home and a hobby, dug ponds and all, built by Alvin Mashburn while his wife Sherrie designed the grounds. Their granddaughter Cassidy Mashburn came back from college and turned the family property into Willow Tree Farms Events, and it's now the place where a lot of Ringgold's private milestones happen. Weddings. Corporate gatherings. Fundraisers for nonprofits that don't have their own grounds.
That last part is why October 10 matters here. The farm isn't just hosting a wedding that weekend. It's hosting the Butterfly Festival.
The Festival That Started With a Loss
The Butterfly Festival goes back to 2017, when the Carter family launched it after losing their daughter Katie Beth on Labor Day 2016. It's organized through Live & Love Ministries, and every dollar it raises funds the Katie Beth Carter Memorial Scholarship Fund, a memorial institute in Nicaragua, and ongoing ministry to other parents who've lost a child. Yellow butterflies became meaningful to the family in the months after their loss, showing up at moments that felt significant, which is where the festival's name and its signature release come from.
A festival built around a single color of butterfly, held every October, funding a scholarship named for the child whose family started it.
This year it runs 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Willow Tree Farms, the same grounds that will host a wedding reception a week later. The farm's own account of its fall season calls hosting the Butterfly Festival an honor, one of several community partnerships it's picked up since opening, alongside things like a baby shower project for local mothers in need. A five-year-old event venue has become the kind of place where a grief-driven nonprofit holds its flagship fundraiser, on the same weekend the county government runs its own separate festival across town.
The Farm Doesn't Stop After Saturday
The next afternoon, October 11, Willow Tree Farms hosts a second event: Paws & Pumpkins, a family fall day that benefits a local animal rescue. Admission runs on tangible donations rather than a ticket price, the kind of format that works when the goal is filling a truck bed with supplies rather than collecting cash at a gate. Same address, same weekend, second cause.
Two nonprofit fundraisers on one piece of farmland in back-to-back days is not something a venue backs into by accident. It's a sign of what the property has become since 2020: a working farm that still runs like a farm most of the year, and turns into Catoosa County's default backdrop for community fundraising every fall.
The Festival That Was Already There
None of this replaces the county's own tradition. Catoosa County Parks and Recreation runs its own Fall Festival at Jack Mattox Park most years, typically landing on a Saturday afternoon in the first half of October, with hayrides, a petting zoo, craft vendors, and a Duck Derby presented by Communities in Schools. Jack Mattox itself is a 55-acre complex on Pine Grove Road between Ringgold and Fort Oglethorpe, built with seven lighted ballfields, a 1.2-mile paved walking track, and a 9-hole disc golf course. It's the county's oldest and largest recreation facility, and its Fall Festival has been the traditional opener to the season for years.
So by the time the Colonnade and Willow Tree Farms fill up in the second week of October, the county has usually already had one big family fall event. What's changed is that it's no longer the only one. The calendar now runs a full month deep, from a county-run festival at a ballfield complex to a downtown street fair to a farm hosting two separate charity days in a row.
What Connects the Festival Weekends
Between all of it, the infrastructure that doesn't need a date on a calendar is the trail system, and it's more built out than a lot of residents may have walked in full. The Ringgold Nature Trail and Creek Walk follows Chickamauga Creek through downtown, connecting the highway commercial district to the historic downtown district, crossing the Old Federal Bridge along the way. It's the kind of path built for fishing, dog walking, or a straight-line jog rather than a destination hike.
A few minutes away, Elsie A. Holmes Nature Park sits on South Chickamauga Creek with five separate walking trails, a screened pavilion, and grounds that stay open for anyone who wants a quieter walk than the festival crowds offer. For anyone with a kayak instead of walking shoes, the West Chickamauga Creek Canoe Launch at Cloud Springs and Dietz Roads is the county's own put-in point on a paddling route that eventually connects to Camp Jordan Park across the state line in East Ridge, Tennessee.
None of these places host a single scheduled event this fall. That's the point. They're what's left to do on the Saturdays that don't have a festival on them, which this October, there are fewer of than usual.
The Shape of the Season
Line the month up and the pattern is clear. Early October belongs to Parks and Recreation at Jack Mattox Park, a county government event on county government land. The second Saturday splits between a public plaza downtown and a private farm ten minutes away, doing two entirely different jobs for two entirely different crowds. The Sunday after that belongs to the farm again, this time for an animal rescue instead of a grief ministry. And running underneath the whole month, whether anyone shows up for a scheduled event or not, are creek walks and canoe launches that don't ask for an RSVP.
That's a fuller fall calendar than Catoosa County has needed to run in past years, and Willow Tree Farms is doing more of the load-bearing work in it than a five-year-old venue usually would.
If you're weighing what a fall this full means for a neighborhood you're already watching, or you're new enough to the area that Post Oak Road and the Colonnade are still names on a map, Wesley Talley knows this stretch of Catoosa County well enough to walk you through it in person. Let's Connect.
