A year and a half ago, the building that now houses Quarterfield Markets didn't exist. The one before it had burned to the ground.
On April 12, 2025, a fire tore through Hertzler Farm & Feed, the family operation on Buckingham Road that had anchored the market's original open-air pavilion. No one was hurt, but several farm animals died in the blaze, and the space where locals had been buying fresh dairy and baked goods just a week earlier was gone. The market's founders, sisters Jill Hostetter and Lauren Davenport, rebuilt anyway. Hertzler Farm and Feed reopened inside a temporary gray structure within days. A barn for farm equipment came next. Then, this past February, the final piece: a permanent building for Quarterfield Markets itself, unveiled at a grand re-opening on February 14, 2026, at 3209 Buckingham Road near the intersection of Anderson Highway and Academy Road.
That detail, the permanent building, is the part of this story most residents haven't caught up with yet. If your mental picture of Quarterfield Markets is still a seasonal pop-up you'd stumble into on a Saturday, it's out of date. The market now keeps regular hours Tuesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays from 9 to 2. It's closed Sundays and Mondays, but it's open, indoors, five days a week, for the first time since the idea started. Hostetter told a Richmond television crew this spring what a year of rebuilding actually felt like: "One year in, we can finally breathe and we can start planning for our future." Davenport, describing what's now on the shelves, put it more simply: "We have a little bit of everything from fresh dairy to baked goods and homecare and skincare."
The second-Saturday pop-up tradition hasn't gone anywhere. From April through December, vendors expand their inventory and food trucks roll in for a bigger version of the regular market, and the barnyard, sheep, goats, bunnies, chickens, stays open year-round for anyone who wants to say hello. What's changed is that this is no longer a once-a-month event wrapped around a weekly stand. It's a place with a front door.
The free calendar is shrinking on purpose
Here's a detail that trips up people who assume Powhatan's summer runs on autopilot until Labor Day: First Fridays Powhatan doesn't happen in July.
The county's own program materials describe it as a spring and summer series that runs the first Friday of May, June, August, and September, with no show in between. It's easy to miss if you're going by instinct rather than the calendar. The 2026 season's third show landed August 7 with Fat Skippy playing classic rock at the Village Park gazebo, and the finale is set for September 4, when the Riverside Band closes things out. Bring a blanket, and Maxey's Store, right across the street, will have ice cream and dinner specials going. After September 4, that particular Friday-night rhythm is done until next May.
The Powhatan Village Farmers Market runs on a similar clock. It opened for the season on Thursday, May 7, at Fighting Creek Park and continues Thursdays from 4 to 6:30 p.m. through September, mixing seasonal produce, grass-fed meats, honey, and baked goods with food trucks and live music. Once September's Thursdays run out, so does the market, at least until next spring.
Put those two together and you get the actual shape of the transition: the free, recurring, low-key stuff that's easy to take for granted, live music on a lawn, a weekly produce run, quietly winds down first. What replaces it isn't more of the same. It's something with a ticket price.
The paid event that takes over where the free ones leave off
Powhatan State Park's Pawpaw Festival has grown into the county's biggest late-summer draw, and 2026 marks its fourth year. It's set for Saturday, September 19, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the park on Powhatan State Park Road, with vendors selling food, local brews, and crafts, plus acoustic music, ranger-led programs, and animal encounters. Unlike everything on the Village calendar so far, this one has a cover charge: $20 per vehicle for special event parking, or $10 for annual pass holders. The festival is built around the pawpaw itself, a custardy, tropical-tasting fruit that happens to be the largest native fruit in the country, thriving in the forested bottomlands along the James River right there in the park. It's sponsored by the Friends of Powhatan State Park, the volunteer group that keeps the park's programming running.
So the sequence for anyone plotting the next six weeks looks like this:
- September 4: First Fridays' season finale at the Village Park gazebo, free
- Weekly through late September: Thursday farmers market at Fighting Creek Park, free
- September 19: Pawpaw Festival at Powhatan State Park, $20 per vehicle
- October 3: Festival of the Grape in the Historic Courthouse Village, free to attend
That last one is worth sitting with. After a month where the free stuff disappears and the state park charges admission, the calendar's biggest fall event goes back to being free to walk into.
The one that's been doing this for 23 years
Powhatan's Festival of the Grape returns October 3 in the Historic Courthouse Village, produced by the Powhatan Chamber of Commerce and now in its 23rd year, long enough to outlast most of the businesses that have opened and closed in the Village during that span. It's a celebration of Virginia wine, with spirits, cideries, and breweries invited in alongside craft vendors and regional food. The KOS Band, an 11-piece outfit that's been playing dance floors up and down the East Coast for more than four decades, takes the stage from 2 to 6 p.m. Parking runs through two lots, one at 3920 Marian Harland Lane for anyone coming from the east, the other at Powhatan Elementary on Old Buckingham Road for anyone coming from the west. Outside food and drink aren't allowed on the grounds, but wine is sold by the bottle and there's no shortage of food vendors to go with it.
Twenty-three years is the kind of number that tells you something the newer events can't. First Fridays and the Pawpaw Festival are still finding their footing, four seasons in for one, a handful of years for the other. Festival of the Grape has already survived long enough to become the fixed point everything else in the fall calendar gets measured against.
Where to eat before or after any of it
The Village itself has quietly become a reason to linger regardless of what's on the calendar. Maxey's Store, at 3867 Old Buckingham Road, has a history stretching back more than a century in the Village, though the general store had actually been missing from the block since 1978 before its current owners, Chase Seymour and Amy Potter, brought it back. The same pair also opened 1933 Public House next door at 3844 Old Buckingham Road. A few doors down, Three Crosses Distilling Co. at 3835A Old Buckingham Road is run by John and Michelle Davenport, and Rise & Grind Cafe at 3879 Old Buckingham Road covers the coffee shift. The County Seat Restaurant, at 3883 Old Buckingham Road, runs its own weekly live music lineup on top of everything else happening in the Village this fall.
None of this requires an event on the calendar to be worth a visit. But if you're already heading into the Village for First Fridays or timing a Saturday around Quarterfield Markets, it's worth knowing what's within walking distance.
The thread running through all of it, the market that rebuilt itself after a fire, the free concerts that quietly skip a month, the ticketed festival that's newer than it feels, and the wine festival old enough to have outlasted three decades of Village turnover, is that Powhatan's calendar isn't static. It changes shape every year, sometimes because a business grows into a permanent building, sometimes because a decades-old event picks up a new headliner. Keeping track of it is part of what it means to actually live here.
If you're weighing what a move to Powhatan looks like day to day, or you're already here and thinking about what's next for your own property, Bradley Real Estate can walk you through it.
