"This concert is huge for Forest City and Rutherford County," Courtney Ashley, the town's Marketing and Events Coordinator, said when Forest City announced it had booked Jimmie Allen for the Pavilion on Park Square. That is a big claim for a pavilion most people only think about once a year, when the million lights go up on Main Street. But look at what POPS has actually been doing since Rutherford County's summer started winding down, and the claim holds up. The lights are the finale, not the season.
Forest City's calendar this fall does not open with tinsel. It opens with a stage.
A Pavilion That Never Really Closed for the Summer
Most residents mark Forest City's Christmas identity by the lighting ceremony and the horse-drawn carriages that follow. Fair enough. The town has earned the nickname. But that framing skips the part of the year where POPS is doing the heaviest lifting.
On August 15, Main Street closed to everything but show cars for the 34th annual Hot Nights Cool Rides Car Show, a Forest City tradition old enough to predate most of the businesses currently occupying its storefronts. Vendors lined Pit Road, WAGY 107.5FM broadcast live from downtown, and the trophy ceremony wrapped the night at POPS. That is not a warm-up act for the holidays. That is a pavilion already running at full capacity in the middle of August, three months before anyone strings a single light.
By the time October arrives, POPS has already logged a full season of programming. The Christmas branding gets the headline. The pavilion does the work.
October 4 Is Two Towns on One Calendar
Here is the piece of the fall schedule that a lot of residents miss entirely, because it lives on two different town websites and nobody has reason to check both.
On October 4, Rutherfordton's Hilltop Fall Festival runs downtown from 10am to 5pm, with more than 135 vendors, live sets from Caution! Blind Driver and Pretty Little Goat, and enough family programming (pumpkin painting, an Excavator Rodeo, a dog costume contest run by Heart of the Foothills Animal Rescue) to eat an entire day. That much is already known to anyone who follows Rutherfordton's own calendar.
What is easy to miss is what happens the moment that festival winds down. The same evening, sponsored by Parker Hannifin, Forest City hosts a free outdoor concert at POPS from 7 to 10pm featuring Legacy Motown Revue. No ticket, no cover, just a short drive from one town's daytime festival into another town's evening one.
Two towns, one day, zero overlap in programming. That is not a coincidence. It is two Main Street organizations coordinating a full day of foothills entertainment without either one duplicating the other's event. If you only follow one town's page, you get half the day.
A Ticketed Concert at POPS
On October 16, POPS switches from free community programming to a ticketed national act. Forest City hosts Jimmie Allen, the ACM New Male Artist of the Year, alongside rising country act Neon Union and local favorite Rutherford County Line. Gates open at 5pm, the show starts at 6pm.
Tickets start at $35 and went on sale September 22 at 12pm. That booking is worth sitting with. A touring artist who was competing on Dancing With the Stars and racking up CMA nominations is playing a pavilion in a town of roughly 7,300 people, and the same civic staff who run the Christmas parade are the ones selling the tickets. Ashley's comment about the booking being "huge for Forest City and Rutherford County" reads less like promotional language once you consider that this is the same team stretching a single small-town venue across an entire calendar of programming, from car shows to national touring acts to caroling under string lights.
Main Street Closes Before It Lights Up
The lighting season itself does not start quietly, either. On November 27, historic Main Street closes from Broadway Street to Church Street at 9am for the lighting ceremony, with the street reopening at 9pm. Businesses are encouraged to stay open for holiday shopping, and the town points visitors toward the municipal lots between Main Street and Trade Street for parking.
Once the lights come on, they stay on every night from November 27 through January 3, running 5pm to 11:30pm. That is five weeks of nightly lighting, not a few isolated event nights, and it is easy to undercount how long that stretch actually runs if you only think of "Christmas in Forest City" as a handful of scheduled weekends.
Within that stretch, two specific things are worth planning around if you actually live here and want to use them rather than just drive past them:
- Horse-drawn carriage rides depart from Huntley Alley behind the POPS concession stand on select December evenings, running from 6 to 9pm. Each carriage seats four adults, or fewer adults with children, for $50 per 15-minute ride, and reservations open online through Explore Forest City.
- An outdoor ice rink operates at POPS on a matching set of nights, with Explore Forest City's Main Street Association staffing the concession stand for hot chocolate, cider, and coffee on Fridays and Saturdays throughout the run.
Neither of those is a secret exactly. But most people experience them as a single December outing rather than as a five-week window with specific reservation dates, and that is the difference between planning a night out and just happening to be downtown when it's cold enough to want cider.
What the Christmas Town Label Actually Covers
Add it up and Forest City's self-branding as the region's Christmas Town covers maybe five weeks out of a season that, in practice, runs from a car show in August through a national touring act in October through nightly lights into January. The label is accurate. It is also incomplete, because it lets the busiest small-town venue in Rutherford County disappear for three quarters of the year it is actually running.
If you live here, that matters less as trivia and more as a planning problem. The Hilltop Fall Festival and the Legacy Motown Revue concert happen on October 4, followed by Jimmie Allen at POPS on October 16. The carriage rides require an online reservation, not a walk-up. None of it waits for the lighting ceremony to remind you it exists.
Forest City's downtown works the way small-town Main Streets are supposed to work, which is to say it rewards people who actually check the calendar instead of assuming they already know what's on it.
If you're already living in Forest City and thinking about what a move within town, or a change in your own property, might look like down the road, Team Drumgool knows this Main Street and this pavilion the way locals do. Reach out when you're ready to talk about it.
