Every school-year commute along State Route 224 passes the same white barn twice a day, and for most of the year it looks exactly the way it has for the last century: a working dairy silhouette against the ridgeline, empty of anything but hay dust and the occasional grazing elk. Then, for one Saturday afternoon in early October, that changes. Straw goes up along the fence line. Families start hauling flannel shirts and mismatched boots out of their cars. By the time the sun drops behind the ridge, the field behind the barn has quietly turned into an outdoor gallery that will stay that way for most of the month.
That's the part people who've only seen this event described secondhand tend to miss. The Scarecrow Festival itself is a two-hour window. What it leaves behind on the trail is the actual event, and it runs for weeks.
Two Hours That Take Three Weeks to Finish
This year's build day is Saturday, October 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. at McPolin Farm, 3000 State Route 224. The city sells two kinds of admission, and the difference matters depending on how you want to spend your Saturday. A non-event ticket, $25, gets you a support frame, a display packet, and straw for stuffing, which you can pick up and build at home on your own schedule. An event ticket, $50, includes all of that plus the actual party window: pumpkin painting, face painting, cookies, and cider while you work.
Either way, the finished scarecrow gets a name tag and a spot staked along the farm's trail, where it joins dozens of others in a walk that changes every year but always tells you something about who just moved into the neighborhood, who has a new baby, whose kid just started high school. Past seasons have run somewhere around 45 to 50 scarecrows staked along the route, built by families who show up specifically to see whose creation claims the best sightline against the barn.
The festival has stuck to roughly the same shape for a long time now, which is part of why it functions as neighborhood infrastructure rather than a one-off event. Friends of the Farm, the volunteer group that maintains the property alongside the city, runs the build day every year and keeps ticket proceeds going back into the site itself.
"We have pumpkin painting, face painting, cookies and cider," farm manager Paige Galvin has said of the afternoon program, describing the mix that's become the festival's standard format.
Why There's No Parking Lot for This
Here's the detail that trips up anyone driving in for the first time: there is no parking at McPolin Farm, and there's no drop-off allowed on State Route 224 either. Organizers ask festival-goers to take public transit or arrive on foot or by bike, which is a real constraint given the highway runs right past the property with limited shoulder space. For families who already live inside the school district boundary, this isn't an inconvenience so much as a known quantity. The farm sits on the paved trail corridor that connects Old Town to the north side of the valley, so walking or biking in isn't a workaround. It's usually the faster option anyway.
That trail access is also why the farm functions as a year-round fixture rather than a seasonal attraction. The same path that fills with scarecrow-builders in October carries commuters on bikes in July and cross-country skiers in January, which means the property never really goes dormant between events. It just changes costume.
The Barn That Almost Wasn't Preserved
Part of why the community treats this site with the kind of care it does traces back to how close it came to disappearing. The McPolin family built the barn in 1922 using recycled timber salvaged from an old tailings mill, fitting the beams together without a single nail, a construction detail that still shows up in guided tours of the structure. The farm operated as a working dairy under the McPolin family and then the Osguthorpes until 1990, when the family concluded that a highway-widening project on State Route 224 would end the dairy business for good. The Utah Department of Transportation bought fourteen acres to widen the road, and Park City bought the remaining 126 acres for $4.4 million to keep the rest of the property as open space rather than let it go to commercial development.
That purchase is the reason the barn is still standing at all, and it's why the city listed the property on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The barn itself runs 7,468 square feet including the loft, with a milking parlor added in the 1950s that adds another 1,500 square feet. None of that history is why families show up for the scarecrow build. But it's why there's a barn left to walk past on the way there.
The Weeks After the Party
The build day gets all the attention, but the display outlasts it by a wide margin. In recent years, scarecrows staked along the trail after the October event have stayed up through late October, giving the corridor nearly a month of rotating outdoor art before Halloween arrives. That timing isn't incidental. It sets up the second bookend of the season: Howl-O-Ween on Main Street, which closes the street to vehicle traffic for a few hours on October 31 and turns it over to costumed kids and their leashed dogs.
The contrast between the two events is worth noticing if you're planning a month around them. The McPolin Farm festival asks people to leave dogs at home, since the trail display and the build-day crowd don't mix well with pets underfoot. Howl-O-Ween runs the opposite way, built specifically around foot and paw traffic on a street that's normally full of cars. Between the two, the school-district corridor gets almost a full month where the same families who drive past the barn every morning end up walking past it, and past each other, on a completely different schedule than the rest of the year.
A few things to know if you're building a scarecrow this year:
- Tickets are sold in two tiers: non-event ($25) and event ($50), with the event tier including the Saturday 2-4 p.m. program.
- There's no parking or drop-off at the farm on State Route 224, so plan to walk, bike, or use public transit.
- Dogs are not permitted at the build-day event, though the trail itself allows leashed dogs outside the festival window.
- Advertising and political messaging on scarecrows isn't allowed, a rule organizers have held to for years.
What the Trail Actually Tracks
None of this is about the farm being scenic, which it obviously is. It's about the fact that a two-hour event on a Saturday afternoon produces a month-long fixture that the rest of the school-district corridor organizes itself around, whether that's a bike ride after school pickup or a slower walk once the leaves finish turning. The party ends at 4 p.m. The trail doesn't.
If you're weighing what it actually means to live somewhere in the Park City School District boundary year-round, from the seasonal rhythms to the practical realities of the neighborhoods along that corridor, Wayne Levinson at Park-City.com can walk you through what different pockets of the district actually offer beyond the barn everyone recognizes from the highway.
