Amos Herr Park hosts two fall events: the Amos Herr 5K Honey Run in August and the Amos Herr Community Festival in September. Both support community causes, but their formats, sponsors, and funding destinations differ.
The run took place at Amos Herr Park off Nissley Road in Salunga-Landisville, and the festival is scheduled there as well.
One Park, Two Very Different Events
The Amos Herr 5K Honey Run and Kids Fun Run happened on August 22. It is a paid race with a registration deadline, a t-shirt cutoff, and title sponsorship from Dutch Gold Honey of Lancaster, with the Kids' Fun Run backed separately by Sardina Dental Group. Runners who signed up were told exactly where their money would land: toward two causes at once, Hempfield recCenter's "Everyone Belongs" accessibility campaign and the ongoing restoration of the historic Herr Homestead.
The Amos Herr Community Festival is a different animal entirely. It runs September 20 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a rain date of September 27, and there is no entry fee. It is built around the Landisville Lions Club's Antique and Classic Car Show, plus a craft fair, food vendors, a Lancaster Kennel Club responsible pet ownership event, and free tours of the 1852 Amos Herr Homestead and its tobacco barn. The only ask is a parking donation, and that donation goes to the Lions Club's own service projects, which is a third, unrelated cause from the two the August run supported.
Here is the side-by-side, because the differences are the whole point:
| Amos Herr 5K Honey Run | Amos Herr Community Festival | |
|---|---|---|
| Date in 2026 | August 22 | September 20 (rain date Sept. 27) |
| Cost | Paid registration | Free, parking donation only |
| Presented by | Dutch Gold Honey, Sardina Dental Group | Landisville Lions Club |
| Money goes to | Hempfield recCenter's Everyone Belongs campaign and Herr Homestead restoration | Lions Club service projects |
| Signature activity | Timed 5K and kids' fun run | Antique car show, homestead tours, craft vendors |
If you missed the run in August, the September 20 festival is a separate opportunity to visit the homestead, but its parking donation goes to the Lions Club's service projects. The August run supported the recCenter's accessibility campaign and the homestead restoration. The two events direct funds to different causes.
What the Homestead Restoration Actually Involves
The building at the center of all this is the 1852 Amos Herr Homestead, a farmhouse and attached tobacco barn that predates East Hempfield Township's suburban build-out by more than a century. The Amos Herr House Foundation and Historical Society run tours through both structures during the festival, and past festivals have included demonstrations like running corn through a corn sheller and holding a stereopticon for children in the home's living room. This is not a staged historical village built for tourists. It is a farmhouse that sat on working land, absorbed into a township park when the surrounding acreage was developed, and it now depends on events like the August run to fund its upkeep.
That funding structure is worth sitting with for a second. The homestead does not have a dedicated township line item covering its restoration. It relies on a 5K that also splits proceeds with a recreation center's accessibility campaign, which tells you something about how thinly stretched historic preservation dollars are in a township focused on parks, athletic fields, and a rec center serving thousands of members.
The Recreation Side of the Park
The other beneficiary of the August run, Hempfield recCenter, sits about a mile away on Church Street and is having its own milestone stretch. The center's own site is marking its 50th anniversary season this year, a fact worth knowing if you're a longtime member who has watched the facility grow from a tennis and racquet operation into something with a 25-meter heated indoor pool, six indoor and ten outdoor tennis courts, and six indoor pickleball courts that now draw players through platforms like Pickleheads looking for open hard-court time. The center also runs the Koser Jewelers Tennis Challenge, a locally sponsored tournament that has become part of its annual calendar.
The park does history. The rec center does fitness. The Lions Club does cars and community. Three organizations, one zip code, and distinct roles in local life.
It is easy to see how a resident might lump Amos Herr Park and Hempfield recCenter together as "the park stuff," since they are close enough to seem connected. But they are governed and funded separately, and the September 20 festival is run by the Lions Club, not the recCenter or the Herr House Foundation, even though the recCenter benefited from the run that happened there weeks earlier.
Church Street's Other Overlap
A few hundred feet from the recCenter's front door is a smaller version of the same pattern. Four Seasons Golf Club, an 18-hole, 121-acre course that anchors a larger 220-acre township recreation site, sits at 949 Church Street. Blue Collar Restaurant, Bar & Catering, which has been promoting a refreshed menu on its own listings, shares that exact address. The restaurant operates out of the golf clubhouse, which means the dining room isn't tucked behind a pro shop counter requiring a membership. It takes outside reservations the same way any standalone restaurant would.
Residents who have played the course for years but never eaten there, or who eat there regularly but assume it is club-members-only, are both working from an incomplete picture. One address, two operations, and neither requires the other.
The Trail That Nobody Mentions First
If the park and the rec center get the attention this time of year, the Lancaster Junction Trail is the piece of Landisville infrastructure that gets overlooked entirely. It runs just over two miles along a former Reading-Columbia rail line, connecting the hamlet of Lancaster Junction to Route 283, and it borders Chickies Creek through farmland in its northern half. Fall is the trail's best window: cooler temperatures, lower humidity, and foliage along the creek corridor that summer's tree canopy hides.
It is not marketed the way the festival or the golf club are. There is no sponsor, no ticket, no seasonal campaign. It is simply there, maintained as township infrastructure, doing quiet work while the more visible institutions get the calendar listings.
Sequencing the Next Few Weeks
If you're planning around all of this, the order matters:
- September 20 is the festival at Amos Herr Park, free admission, parking donation to the Lions Club, homestead and tobacco barn tours running most of the afternoon.
- September 27 is the rain date, so don't assume a washout cancels the whole thing.
- Any weekend through early October is workable for the Lancaster Junction Trail, before the farmland along Chickies Creek loses its color.
- Blue Collar Restaurant takes reservations independent of golf club membership, so a fall dinner there doesn't require booking a tee time first.
- Hempfield recCenter's pickleball courts require a one-time fee for non-members, worth knowing if you've been meaning to try the sport that's clearly taken over half the rec center's open-court schedule.
None of this changes property values or school boundaries. It is simply what living in Landisville actually looks like in the back half of September.
If you're weighing a move into this part of East Hempfield Township, or you already live here and are curious what a house near this corridor of parks, trails, and clubhouses might be worth in today's market, Josh Wood has spent two decades tracking how Lancaster County's neighborhoods like this one actually function day to day. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what that local knowledge means for your next move.
