For All
Food Booths, Farmers Market, Craft Booths, Restaurant Oktoberfest Specials, Fall Color Lake Cruises



For Kids
Moonwalk, Hay Rides, Face Painting, Caramel Apples, Cotton Candy, Popcorn and more.



Children's Main Stage Entertainment
200 block of Broad Street (just north of Main)



The Great Pumpkin Giveaway: 1:00PM
400 pumpkins till they are gone! One per child 10 years old and under in the east alley of the 200 block of Broad Street

For All
Food Booths, Farmers Market, Craft Booths, Restaurant Oktoberfest Specials, Fall Color Lake Cruises



For Kids
Moonwalk, Hay Rides & Pony Rides, Face Painting, Caramel Apples, Cotton Candy, Popcorn and more.



Oktoberfest Street Dance
200 block of Broad Street. Music by the Authentic German Polka Band, Oktoberfest Dancing by the Milwaukee Donauschwaben Kinder Gruppe - Noon to 5PM

Beer and Spirits Festival
Lake Geneva's second annual Beer and Spirits Festival takes place Saturday, October 29 from 1 to 5 p.m. Held at The Abbey Resort, the event features unlimited tastings of beer from 25 Midwest craft breweries, specialty liquors, food, live music and an appearance by former Green Bay Packer, Gilbert Brown. A special raffle will benefit the Water Safety Patrol. For tickets, visit www.lakegenevabeerandspirits.com or call 262-245-1000.


A dazzling autumn by design

The secret behind Lake Geneva's magnificent fall color display

Due to a little known secret, the Lake Geneva area has always been the place for the most dramatic, longest lasting autumn display. The next time you take a drive in Lake Geneva in the fall, you can thank America's foremost landscape architects for the spectacular view.

When many of Chicago's elite built estates on Geneva Lake beginning in the late 1800s, they didn't stop with just their mansions. Several went on to hire America's foremost landscape architects to design the grounds. For estates like Wrigley's Green Gables, a top request was to have the longest lasting color display possible. So, architects carefully selected landscapes that yield specific colors from a wide species of trees and shrubs. Beginning in early September, trees begin to be dotted with yellow accents, followed by bursts of burnt orange, dashes of fiery red and ending with a finale of caramel brown in late November.

According to John Notz, Jr., a Chicago lawyer and amateur historian, these "artists" who help paint the area with beautiful fall colors include John Charles Olmsted son of the founder of American landscape architecture; Jens Jensen, Danish landscape architect of Humboldt Park in Chicago's West Town neighborhood; and Olof Benson, designer of Chicago's Lincoln Park North Pond.

Several substantial landscape projects around Lake Geneva, including the estates of Hutchinson, Harris, Swift, Bartlett and the Yerkes Observatory, were designed by John Charles Olmsted. He was heavily influenced by his father's work, especially having grown up in a small home in the middle of Central Park during the construction of his father's design for the park. The brothers, John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. went on to create the largest landscape architecture firm in America.

Lake Geneva Getaway Winners
You too can be a real winner of a “Lake Geneva Getaway” package valued at approximately $500. These people did

2011