On the last Friday of July, cars started filling the gravel lot at Holicong Park a little after five. Lawn chairs came out of trunks. A line formed at Skips Food Truck before the tables from Calico Bread and Flower Girl Farm were even fully set up. Kids ran toward a bounce house while a Cub Scout pack wrangled a rain gutter regatta near the pavilion. None of this existed here a year ago.
If you asked most people what happens in Buckingham Township in the fall, they would say Peddler's Village. Scarecrows on the lampposts, a beer garden, apple cider. That answer is not wrong. But it is only half the calendar this year, and the other half belongs entirely to the township itself.
The Village That Was Always Built for Visitors
Peddler's Village has been drawing people into Buckingham Township since June 1962, when Earl Jamison opened it with 14 shops and the Cock 'n Bull Restaurant, modeling the layout on a trip he'd taken to Carmel, California. More than sixty years later, the Village covers 42 acres and holds more than 60 shops, most of them locally owned, alongside seven full-service restaurants including Cock 'n Bull, Earl's New American, Peddler's Pub, and Buttonwood Grill.
It is, by design, a destination. People drive in from Philadelphia, from New Jersey, from New York for a weekend. That has never been a problem for Buckingham Township. A 63-year-old shopping village that draws outside dollars into the township is a good neighbor to have. But a destination built for outside visitors is a different thing from a gathering place built for the people who already live here, and until this year, Buckingham Township did not really have the second kind.
The First Night Market the Township Has Ever Run
That changed with three Friday nights this summer. The township's newly constituted Parks and Recreation Commission launched the Buckingham Night Market at Holicong Park, on Route 202 across from the Midway Volunteer Fire Company carnival grounds, with dates set for July 31, August 28, and September 25, running 5:30 to 8:30 PM each time.
Lisa Braud, who is spearheading the event for the parks and rec board, has been direct about what the market is trying to do: give residents a reason to leave the house on a Friday night that has nothing to do with driving to Peddler's Village or anywhere else outside the township. Supervisor Mike Bateman, the board's liaison, put it plainly when the market was announced, calling it unlike anything Buckingham has ever offered before.
The vendor list backs that up. Bake Ability and Free Spirit, both from Buckingham Green just across the street from the park, signed on early. So did Hundred Fruit Farm and Nursery, Calico Bread, and Flower Girl Farm. A free Kids Zone runs alongside the market with bounce houses, balloon art, and complimentary face painting, and each Night Market doubles as a food drive for the Bucks County Housing Group, with organizers asking attendees to bring canned goods, pasta, rice, peanut butter, cereal, or hygiene items.
The last date, September 25, is the final Night Market of the season. If you have been meaning to check it out, that Friday is the one left.
What Else Has Been Quietly Added This Year
The Night Market is the headline addition, but it is not the only piece of the resident-facing calendar that expanded in 2026. The township's Summer Concert Series, held Thursdays at the Hansell Park Band Shell, ran a full ten-week lineup this year:
| Date | Act |
|---|---|
| June 18 | Gruvtyme Band |
| June 25 | The O'Fenders |
| July 2 | The Big Baby Band |
| July 9 | Phantom Trap |
| July 16 | Highway Run |
| July 23 | Dueling Pianos |
| July 30 | Barefoot Bobby and The Breakers |
| August 6 | End of Innocence |
| August 13 | Cherry Lane Band |
| August 20 | Yesterday's Gone |
Hansell Park itself is a 39-acre site at the intersection of Route 413 and Hansell Road, with walking trails, a pond, and a playground built around the band shell. On June 25, the concert series paired with Day in the Park, a free daytime event with pony rides, historical reenactors, and visits from local fire trucks and police vehicles, before the evening's concert began.
Earlier in the season, the township's Environmental Advisory Commission ran a native plant sale at the Hansell Park Pavilion, offering residents plants selected to support pollinators and birds rather than the commodity annuals sold at big box garden centers. It is a small event, but it fits the same pattern as the Night Market and the concert series: programming built by the township, for the township, that did not exist in this form a few years back.
Buckingham Township covers 33 square miles, which makes it the largest township in Bucks County by land area, with Buckingham Mountain rising to 520 feet over otherwise rolling countryside. A township that large, spread across so much open land, has historically had a harder time giving its residents a single place to run into each other. This year's additions at Holicong Park and Hansell Park are the township's answer to that problem, and they are new enough that even longtime residents may not have caught up to them yet.
What's Left on the Peddler's Village Side
None of this replaces what Peddler's Village does well, and the fall lineup there is worth tracking on its own terms. Scarecrows go up for the Village's 46th annual Scarecrow Village, on display daily through October 26, with scarecrow-making workshops on select weekends and prizes awarded for the best entries. OctoberFeast follows with a weekend of beer gardens, live music, and extended Saturday shopping hours until 8 PM.
Food Truck Thursdays returns on select Thursdays through the fall, 4 to 8 PM, with a rotating list of regional trucks and the occasional foam party for kids. Further out, the Village's Apple Festival and Grand Illumination Celebration carry the calendar into November, continuing a run of seasonal programming that includes a May Strawberry Festival, a July sand sculpture display, and an August Peach Weekend.
Two Calendars, One Township
The mistake would be to treat these as competing options, one to pick over the other. They are not competing. Peddler's Village keeps doing what it has done since 1962: pulling visitors into Buckingham Township and giving the area a name people outside Bucks County actually recognize. The township's own parks programming is doing something Peddler's Village was never built to do, which is give the people who already live here a reason to gather among themselves.
If you have lived in Buckingham Township for years and never made it to a Night Market or a Thursday concert at Hansell Park, this fall is a reasonable time to start. September 25 closes out the Night Market season at Holicong Park, and the last stretch of Peddler's Village's scarecrow display runs through October 26. Both are on the calendar. Only one of them is actually yours.
Commercial Partners SERHANT tracks what's changing across Bucks County's commercial corridors, from shop turnover at Peddler's Village to the civic programming reshaping how townships like Buckingham use their public space. If you're curious how any of this connects to the commercial side of the township, from Buckingham Green to the properties around Route 202, reach out and we'll walk you through it.
