Leland Grove's Fall Weekends Are All Across Chatham Road

Two people can attend the exact same event in Washington Park this fall and have completely different evenings. One of them parks in a remote lot on Wabash, waits for a shuttle, rides in, walks the pumpkin path, rides back out, and drives home. The other one hears the bells start up, puts on a jacket, walks east down Laurel or Cherry Road, crosses at Fayette, and is standing in front of the Thomas Rees Memorial Carillon in about the time it takes the first group to find a parking space.

That second person lives in Leland Grove. And the reason the arrangement works so well is not luck of the map. The park, garden and bell tower that anchor the Grove's eastern edge sit on ground that was virtually all part of the Leland farm, the same farm that gave this small city its name. Springfield's biggest fall traditions are staged on what was once the neighborhood's own back field. Nobody sends Grovers an invitation, because nobody needs to.

The park you can hear from the driveway

Start with the thing residents stop noticing after a few years. The Rees Carillon's free concert schedule runs May through September, Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m., with Carlo van Ulft, the Springfield Park District's master carillonist, and local assistant carillonists playing everything from original carillon compositions to arrangements of pop material. A reduced winter schedule follows.

Which means the Wednesdays left in September are the last of the season on the summer calendar, starting with Sept. 9. If you have spent summers half-hearing the bells from a back patio on Kenwood or Warren without ever walking over, this is the closing stretch.

Worth knowing what you have been half-hearing. The tower is a 132-foot brutalist campanile of concrete, brick and steel, dedicated in 1962 and designed by Springfield architect Bill Turley, who also designed the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Inside are 67 bells cast by the Dutch foundry Petit & Fritsen, with a combined weight of 82,753 pounds. Size claims vary depending on who is counting, from third largest to fifth largest in the world, and local sources have long settled on "one of the largest and finest." Either way, the instrument you can hear from a Leland Grove garage is not a municipal novelty. It is one of a small number of carillons anywhere that the public can actually go inside.

This coming weekend, on the Garden lawn

Art Spectacular at the Carillon lands Sept. 12 and 13, Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., free admission, rain or shine. This is the 21st year. The 2026 show brings 40-plus juried artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, jewelry, ceramics, mixed media, wood and glass, with live artist demonstrations, local musicians, a Kids' Place and Kids Only Art Sale, a silent auction and gift basket raffle, and a new wine tent run by All About Wine inside a gated area. Van Ulft plays the carillon every hour on the hour above it.

The scale is the part that surprises people who assume "art fair" means a dozen tables. Art Spectacular was founded in 2006 by Rees Carillon Society board member Barb Walker, draws roughly 5,000 attendees over the two days, and carries work priced from about $50 to $7,500. It has been named to Sunshine Artist magazine's best-art-fairs lists for years running, ranked 44th in the 2020 Best 100, and it remains the only Central Illinois fair with that recognition. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the carillon, run by a society with no paid staff.

Here is the Grover-specific detail. Parking for Art Spectacular is free "in the park and the surrounding side streets." Those surrounding side streets are, in part, your streets. Five thousand people over a weekend in mid-September is not a traffic emergency, but it is the first weekend of the season when the quiet blocks get borrowed. Walking in from the west side of Chatham Road costs you nothing and solves the problem before it starts.

October is two weekends, and they are not interchangeable

Most people outside the neighborhood know the October event as one thing: the pumpkins. It is actually a two-part system, a week apart, and the first half is the part locals can use best.

Carve for the Carillon, Oct. 10 and 11

Free admission, free pumpkins, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days, rain or shine, near the carillon. You bring your carving tools. The Rees Carillon Society brings the pumpkins, and they are first come, first served each day until they run out. New this year is Scarecrow Row, a trail of scarecrows built by local groups. Volunteers who sign up for a shift get a free ticket to the following weekend's show.

First come, first served is the entire strategic argument for living four blocks away. Somebody driving in from Chatham or Sherman has to guess at the arrival time. You can walk over at 11 a.m., see how the pumpkin supply looks, and come back with the kids or grandkids after lunch if it holds. The whole event is sponsored by outfits including CEFCU, Ivy Rehab for Kids and the Springfield Park District, which is why nothing at it costs money.

Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, Oct. 16 and 17

Friday and Saturday, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., around the carillon and the Washington Park Botanical Garden grounds. More than 2,000 illuminated hand-carved pumpkins in a typical year, with 2,500-plus counted in 2025, plus special carillon music, lighting, sound effects, food vendors and the Tree of Lights. Admission at the gate is $10 for adults, $7 for children 4 to 11, free for ages 3 and under. Advance tickets run $7 and $5, cash or check only, and Potter Drug carries them.

The event was founded by former Rees Carillon Society board member Brenda Poston, inspired by the well-known Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular in Providence, Rhode Island. Providence uses professional artists. Springfield's version is carved by whoever shows up the weekend before, which is why the pumpkin you cut at Carve is the pumpkin glowing next to the Botanical Garden path seven days later.

Attendance ranges from 5,000 to 8,000 people across the two nights. That is the number that matters to anyone living in a city of well under a square mile, with residential blocks a few minutes' walk from the park entrance. In 2025, free shuttles ran continuously from the old Ashley HomeStore lot at Wabash and Chatham Road, and the Springfield Park District's event page is where the current-year parking arrangement gets posted. Treat last year's shuttle as last year's shuttle and check before the 16th.

A few things that only work if you are walking:

• You can arrive at 6:30 p.m. sharp, before the line stacks up, without having budgeted 25 minutes for the lot and the shuttle.
• You can leave when a five-year-old is done rather than when the shuttle loop says so.
• Advance tickets bought earlier in the month at Potter Drug save $3 per adult and $2 per child, and cash or check is the only way to get that price.

The park holds a piece of the neighborhood

Leland Grove and neighboring Jerome both take their name from Jerome Leland, a 19th-century farmer who hosted local gatherings at a grove on his land. Much of the food served at Springfield's Leland Hotel was grown on that farm. Virtually all of what is now the Grove was once part of it.

The farmhouse itself stood at Willemoore and Wiggins until 2021, when its owner, Frank Vala, had it demolished, with salvage and demolition handled by Modern Paving, Scrap & Demolition of Springfield. Karen Ackerman Witter, who has lived in Leland Grove for decades and spent 35 years at the Illinois State Museum, wrote a first-person account for Illinois Times of watching the excavator work while neighbors stood on the block and cars circled slowly, some with the newspaper story still sitting on the passenger seat. In 2022, the farm's summer kitchen outbuilding was moved from the site into Washington Park.

The park is not merely next to this neighborhood's history. It is holding the last standing piece of it.

That is a strange and specific thing to be able to say about a public park across a four-lane road. It also explains something about the way Grovers use the place, as an extension of the property rather than a destination requiring a plan. The city incorporated in 1950 for the unglamorous purpose of paving its dirt roads, got nine miles done in about 18 months, and voted 3 to 1 against Springfield annexation in 1957. Grovers have been drawing their own lines for 76 years while treating the park as commons.

After the pumpkins come down

The Washington Park Botanical Garden at 1740 W. Fayette Ave. stays free year-round, open noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, closed Thanksgiving and the day after, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. It holds more than 1,200 plant species, including the rose garden and a heavy mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, which is the reason the grounds still read as somewhere to walk in late November.

Programming keeps going past October. The 2026 fall calendar in Illinois Times lists a two-hour leaf-identification hike at the Garden covering around 50 leaves, pre-registration required by Sept. 24, $7 for residents and $10 for non-residents, with adult chaperones required and only the leaf collectors paying. If you want to know which rate applies to a Leland Grove address, the Garden's number is 217-546-4116 and that is a one-minute call. In December, the Rees Carillon Society runs Caroling at the Carillon, free, with the bells accompanying. The Carillon Belles also run free third-grade tours in spring and fall.

Everything else on this corridor moves slower. Town & Country Shopping Center on South MacArthur changed hands in early 2026, with new owner Trent Overhue telling reporters he planned roughly $5 million in work, mostly facade and exterior. IDOT's reconstruction of MacArthur Boulevard between Wabash Avenue and South Grand, meanwhile, now carries a construction window of 2029 to 2031 and an estimated $34 million cost. The retail and road picture around the Grove will look different in five years. The park calendar will look almost exactly the same, which is worth something.

For a post-park stop that does not involve getting on Veterans Parkway, FreshHut sits at 3109 Chatham Road at the Wabash corner, in the space that was Papa John's for years and then Wakamoles, serving shawarma, gyros, kebabs and wraps. Grab-A-Java is at 300 Chatham Road. Both are inside the same short radius that makes the whole walking argument work.

One last thought

We spend a lot of time with sellers and buyers in this small city, and the thing people underrate is not square footage or street trees. It is the fifteen-minute radius. A neighborhood where a free 40-artist show, a 2,000-pumpkin night and a 67-bell concert series all happen inside walking distance is a neighborhood where the calendar does some of the work of the house.

If you are curious what that radius is doing to values on your block, or you are thinking about a move and want a straight read on the Grove and the surrounding Sangamon County towns, the team at Cindy Grady knows these streets by name. Request a free consultation and home valuation, and we will give you the practical version, no pressure attached. In the meantime, we will see you on the Garden lawn Saturday.