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Spend fall in Fort Atkinson, WI — seasonal recipes at Jones Market, Broadway-caliber theatre at The Fireside, and free history at the Hoard Historical Museum.
Inspiration Lives Here: Plan Your Fall Weekend in Fort Atkinson
There’s no better time to visit Fort Atkinson than in the fall.
Start at Jones Market, where the shelves this time of year practically tell you what to cook. Jones Dairy Farm has been a Fort Atkinson name for generations, and their seasonal recipes at jonesdairyfarm.com are built around whatever's fresh on the shelf when you walk in. Grab what looks good, take the recipe home, and you've got a fall dinner that didn't come from a grocery store an hour away.
From there, head to The Fireside, which is running Come From Away September 10 through October 25. If you haven't seen it, it's the true story of a small Newfoundland town that took in thousands of stranded travelers after 9/11, and it's become one of the most beloved shows in recent Broadway history for a reason. Tickets are already moving at firesidetheatre.com, so this isn't one to leave until the last week of the run.
Fort Atkinson also happens to be home to the National Dairy Shrine, and right inside the same building is the Hoard Historical Museum, free to visit for both. The museum's Mysteries of the Mounds gallery is worth the stop on its own: a replica keyhole pit house shows how Late Woodland-period families actually lived here a thousand years ago, and a 17-minute film in the gallery's small theater lays out how the earthen mounds scattered across southern Wisconsin came to be.
Once you've seen the film, the mounds themselves aren't far. The Jefferson County Indian Mounds Park and Trail sits about ten minutes south, right on Lake Koshkonong. Whitewater's Effigy Mounds Preserve is a short drive west. Aztalan State Park, one of the most significant archaeological sites in the Midwest, is twenty minutes north off Highway 89.
None of this requires much planning. A morning at the market, an afternoon at the museum, an evening at the theater, and somewhere in between, a stop at a thousand-year-old mound that's been sitting quietly in a field long before any of us got here.
Inspiration lives here. This fall, come find it.
Visit explorefort.com to plan your trip.
