A September Week in Hempfield: Three Local Calendars, One District

This week, if you live anywhere in Landisville, Mountville, or East Petersburg, your calendar is crowded. Three separate local traditions are scheduled across the same five days. That's the thing worth knowing about Hempfield School District: it shares a mascot, a school board, and a tax base, but it does not share a September.

East Petersburg goes loud from Tuesday to Saturday

East Petersburg Day kicked off Tuesday, September 15, and runs through Saturday the 19th, with carnival rides, games, and live music at East Petersburg Community Park Tuesday through Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday is the big one: a 5K and kids' fun run at 9 a.m., a parade at 10 a.m. organized by the East Petersburg-Landisville Lions Club, and rides that open at 4 p.m. and run straight through fireworks at 9:30. In between, the East Petersburg Fire Company runs a golf ball drop with a $500 prize for whoever's ball lands closest to the pin, and this year they're following it with a bucket of free candy dropped for the kids in the crowd. A band called PopScotch closes out the night before the fireworks start.

Kristin Troop, who chairs the events committee behind all of this, put it plainly in a TownLively report about why the borough keeps doing it every year: "You can walk down the street and see a neighbor, and you can walk to the park." That's not marketing copy. East Petersburg is small enough that the parade route and the grocery store parking lot are populated by the same forty or fifty families you'd recognize anywhere else in town.

The same Saturday, Mountville does something quieter

Here's where it gets interesting. While East Petersburg is setting off fireworks over Graystone Road on Saturday the 19th, Mountville Borough is holding its own event that same day: the Mountville Community Yard Sale. No carnival, no golf ball drop, no parade route. Just driveways and porches across town, listed on the borough's own calendar alongside routine notices like trash pickup delays and council meeting dates.

The schedule below puts the overlap in view, including the nearby East Earl event.

Twenty minutes east, a fourth tradition nobody in Hempfield actually planned

If you're willing to drive twenty minutes past the school district line, Shady Maple Farm Market in East Earl Township runs its own Whoopie Pie Celebration September 17 through 20, with more than 45 flavors and a scavenger hunt for kids twelve and under. It's not a Hempfield event by any technical measure. But plenty of Landisville and Mountville families treat it as part of the same week, because it falls inside the same four days and it's close enough to be a Saturday morning stop before or after whatever's happening back in East Petersburg.

That's a small but real fact about how people who live here actually move through the calendar. The school district boundary tells you where your kids go to class. It doesn't tell you where your weekend actually happens.

Landisville isn't hosting a party. It just finished building somewhere to have one.

Landisville doesn't have its own version of East Petersburg Day or the Mountville yard sale. What it has instead is Amos Herr Park, the 56-acre park on Nissley Road that also houses the East Hempfield Township municipal building. The land was donated by Amos Herr, a former high school teacher and coach whose family were among the earliest settlers in Landisville, and the park's Phase 2 expansion wrapped up in 2025: a second pavilion near the Dream Park playground, 43 additional parking spaces, bike racks, a finished trail loop, and two covered bocce courts.

The upgrade took longer than anyone expected. Township supervisors first approved the plan in April 2021, then the project stalled during the pandemic. Construction and materials costs that were estimated at roughly $380,000 in September 2022 had climbed past $800,000 by February 2024, and the township closed the gap with $572,531 in state grant money, on top of $228,470 it had already committed as matching funds for earlier phases of the project. None of that shows up in a walk through the finished trail today, but it explains why the park residents are using this fall looks noticeably different from the one that sat half-finished for three years.

So while East Petersburg is running rides and Mountville is setting out yard sale signs, Landisville's contribution to the week is a place to walk it off. No carnival required.

What one week actually tells you about this school district

Here's one way to read the week: Hempfield School District brings together distinct communities, each with its own local calendar. East Petersburg's carnival draws visitors from well outside its own borders. Mountville's yard sale is built for people who already live on those streets. Landisville doesn't throw an annual event at all, it just maintains the park that both of the other two villages end up using anyway.

If you're new to the district, or thinking about which of these three places actually fits how you like to spend a Saturday, that distinction matters more than the shared school mascot does. Do you want the five-night carnival with fireworks, or the quiet yard-sale Saturday, or the twenty-minute drive to a bigger event that isn't really yours but might as well be? All three are technically Hempfield. None of them feel the same from a front porch.

If you're planning your week around this

• East Petersburg Day, East Petersburg Community Park, 2575 Graystone Road: carnival Tuesday through Friday 5-9 p.m., Saturday 5K and fun run at 9 a.m., parade at 10 a.m., rides open at 4 p.m., fireworks at 9:30 p.m.
• Mountville Community Yard Sale: Saturday, September 19, borough-wide, check the borough's own community calendar for specific addresses as they're posted.
• Shady Maple Whoopie Pie Celebration, 1324 Main St., East Earl Township: September 17-20, giant whoopie pie sampling starts at 10 a.m. on the 19th and 20th while supplies last.
• Amos Herr Park, 1700 Nissley Rd., Landisville: open daily, now with the finished trail loop and second pavilion if you need a quiet stop between the louder stuff.

For a bite before or after any of it, Square Mile Public House on West Main Street in Mountville has been the town's go-to for weekend brunch and wood-fired pizza since owners Dan and Kelly Scarberry took over the space, and Mountville Family Restaurant on Highland Drive has been serving diner breakfast since 2019 if you'd rather start the day quiet before East Petersburg gets loud.

None of this requires you to be shopping for a house here. It just requires you to already live in one of these three villages, or to be curious about which one actually matches how you want your Saturdays to go. That's usually where the real answer to "what's it like living here" shows up. Not in a listing description, but in whether your town throws a parade or just sets out folding tables in the driveway.

If you're weighing which of these three villages actually fits your life, the James Dunn Team has spent more than two decades sorting out exactly this kind of local detail for buyers trying to figure out where they'd actually feel at home. Reach out when you're ready to talk it through. Deal Gets Dunn.