Warren County spends most of the calendar spread thin, with events scattered across Belvidere, Hackettstown, Oxford, and Phillipsburg on different weekends. August is the exception. For roughly ten days between the last week of July and the second week of August, three of the county's biggest programming engines run at the same time, and if you treat them as one calendar instead of three, you get more out of living here than any visitor driving in for a single ticket ever will.
This is a resident's guide to that overlap, plus the quieter August habits worth building around it.
The eight days that pull everyone to Phillipsburg
The anchor is the Warren County Farmers Fair, which has celebrated the American farmer and family tradition since 1937 and is marking its 88th year this summer. The 2026 dates are July 25 through August 1, at the fair office and grounds at 1350 Strykers Road in Phillipsburg.
If you've been going for years, the rhythm is familiar. If you're newer to the county, the thing to understand is that this isn't a county fair with a balloon festival attached. It's the reverse. The 26th Annual Hot Air Balloon Festival features mass balloon launches each evening at 6 PM, an attraction that has been part of the fair since 2001. Plan your evening around that launch window and the rest of the day fills in around it.
What else is worth knowing before you go:
- Garden Tractor Pulls and Demolition Derbies run in the Main Arena and require tickets, while the Kids' Corral keeps its shows and activities free.
- The beer garden showcases Czig Meister Brewing Company, the Hackettstown brewery you already know from the Belvidere event calendar.
- Advance ticket orders are accepted by mail only through July 15 on a first-come first-serve basis, so if you're reading this after mid-July, plan on buying at the gate.
The move most locals make: pick two evenings, not one. A weeknight for the balloon launch and the arena events, then a Saturday or Sunday for the 4-H barns, the Traditional Arts Expo, and the food.
What happens the moment the fair packs up
The fair closes Saturday, August 1. The following weekend, the summer's biggest theater run opens its final stretch a twenty-minute drive east.
Centenary Stage Company's 2026 SUMMERFEST season closes with Maltby & Shire's Closer Than Ever, featuring Broadway veteran John Leone, an original cast member of Jersey Boys, leading a four-person ensemble. The musical revue begins July 30 and runs through August 9 in the Kutz Theatre of the Lackland Performing Arts Center on the campus of Centenary University.
Two things make this worth flagging for residents specifically. First, Centenary Stage Company has served as the major cultural resource of New Jersey's Skylands Region for more than 35 years, which means the Kutz Theatre is a short drive rather than a Manhattan train. Second, the show is directed by award-winning director Sara Louise Lazarus, whose career spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theatre. This is not community theater with a hometown discount attached. It's Broadway-caliber work in a 715 Grand Avenue building most of your neighbors have never walked into.
If you've been meaning to try Centenary for years and never got around to it, the closing weekend of a SUMMERFEST run is the low-friction way in.
A weekend-by-weekend cheat sheet
Because the overlap is dense, here's the compressed view for planning purposes:
| Dates | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| July 25 – Aug 1 | 1350 Strykers Rd, Phillipsburg | Farmers' Fair & Hot Air Balloon Festival, 6 PM launches |
| July 30 – Aug 9 | Kutz Theatre, 715 Grand Ave, Hackettstown | Closer Than Ever, Centenary Stage SUMMERFEST |
| Aug 1 opening | Oxford Municipal Building | WC Arts exhibit opens |
| Aug 16 | Garret D. Wall Park, Belvidere | Free lawn concert, Coo Coo Cachoo |
| Aug 23 | Oxford Municipal Building | WC Arts exhibit artist reception |
| Sept 13 | Garret D. Wall Park, Belvidere | Craig Sailer Project (series closer) |
Almost none of this appears on a single town calendar. That's the point of thinking about it as one August rather than four town calendars.
Belvidere as the county's August living room
Once the fair ends and the theater season winds down, Belvidere carries the rest of the month. Two threads to know.
The first is the free lawn concert series. Garret D. Wall Park sits in the center of Belvidere and hosts free family-friendly lawn concerts where the NJ Symphony's Patriotic Brass Quintet has played the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, Stars and Stripes and more. Bring blankets or lawn chairs and coolers are permitted, though alcohol and tobacco are prohibited. This summer's lineup includes Coo Coo Cachoo on 8/16 and Craig Sailer Project on 9/13. The series is presented by Warren County Cultural & Heritage Affairs with funding from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which is why admission stays free.
The second is Found Fest. Belvidere is running Found Fest Block Parties hosted by FOUND, The Art of Home, with live summer music at various venues and shops in town through October. That's the connective tissue between the concerts, the coffee shop crowd around King's Gambit, and the block-party energy that keeps Belvidere feeling more like a small city than a river town on August weekends.
Fold in the new WC Arts exhibit opening August 1 at the Oxford Municipal Building, running through October 17, with a reception on August 23, and Belvidere and Oxford together cover the second half of the month once Phillipsburg goes quiet.
The quieter August habits worth keeping
The big-event calendar is the loud version of August in Warren County. There's a quieter one that lives underneath it, and locals who stay year-round tend to use both.
Shippen Manor Sundays. Historic Shippen Manor is a restored 18th century iron master's mansion located a quarter mile west of the Route 31/Wall Street intersection in Oxford, on Belvidere Avenue. The museum is open the first and second Sundays from May to December, and there is no admission fee. First and second Sundays in August are the two low-traffic dates most residents forget exist. Pair a morning tour with lunch in downtown Belvidere and the day is built.
Czig Meister beyond the fair. The brewery you'll find pouring at the Farmers' Fair also hosts community events on its own turf. Past programming has included Best Friend Dog Rescue and Cold Nose Warm Heart Animal Rescue meet-and-greets, which is the kind of thing that turns a brewery visit into a Saturday afternoon rather than a stop.
Jersey Girl Brewing. Jersey Girl Brewing, at 426 Sand Shore Road in Hackettstown, is celebrating a decade of craft beer with live music and special beer releases, and its market days are a reliable rainy-Sunday backup when the outdoor plans fall apart.
The theater habit, kept up. After Closer Than Ever closes on August 9, Centenary's fall calendar picks up. If you've never subscribed, the Kutz and Sitnik Theatres are the two rooms to know at 715 Grand Avenue.
Why the overlap matters for how you use the county
Most residents inherit the sense that Warren County is a place with a lot of quiet ground between events. That's mostly true. August is the ten-day exception, and the counties around us don't have a compressed run quite like it. Somerset has its own summer calendar, Hunterdon has ag fairs earlier in July, but the Farmers' Fair, a SUMMERFEST closer, a free town-park concert series, and a new gallery exhibit landing inside a single two-week window is a Warren County pattern.
The practical upshot: block off two evenings for the fair, one for the theater, one for a lawn concert, and one for Shippen Manor or the WC Arts opening. That's five nights of programming inside twenty minutes of home, none of which requires a hotel or a highway.
If you're weighing what a summer here actually looks like once you're past the first year, that's the honest answer.
Whether you're settling deeper into Belvidere, Hackettstown, or one of the quieter corners of the county, real estate decisions here tend to hinge on how a place feels the eleven months when the fair isn't in town. That's the work Beth Harding has been doing across Warren County and the Skylands for close to two decades. Schedule your free consultation to talk through what your next move in Warren County could look like.
