Things to Do in Lee County This Late Summer and Fall
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
If you live here, you already know spring is the loud season. The Lee County Fair takes over Fireman's Park the third weekend of May, and by the time the carnival lights come down the county calendar seems to exhale. Summer thins out. August feels long. Then September arrives, and one Sunday afternoon a town of a few dozen people six miles southwest of Giddings quietly hosts one of the most specific cultural gatherings in Central Texas.
That Sunday is the point of this post. If you have lived in Lee County for years and have never made the short drive out FM 2239, this is the year to fix that. And if you are new here, it is the fastest way to understand what makes this county different from the ten others that look like it on a map.
The 37th annual Wendish Fest lands on Sunday, September 27, 2026, from 10 AM to 5 PM at the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum, 1011 County Road 212, Giddings, and admission is free. The drive-thru Wendish meal line opens at 9:30 AM, and lunch tickets are only sold at the festival that day. If you want the noodles and sausage without walking the grounds, get there before the church service lets out.
A few practical things worth knowing before you turn onto CR 212:
That is the shape of the day. What actually makes it worth the drive is what is happening under the tents.
Most small-town festivals in Texas share a template: cook-off, car show, live music, kids' area. Wendish Fest breaks the template because the crafts and food are specific to a group that arrived here in September 1854 aboard the Ben Nevis, more than 500 Wendish Lutherans sailing from Europe seeking religious liberty. They founded what they eventually called Serbin, meaning "Sorbian land," in 1860.
You can read that history at the museum any weekend. The festival is the one day of the year the traditions come out of the display cases and onto the picnic grounds. Visitors see demonstrations of spinning, weaving, rug looming, basket weaving, knitting, and stone-ground cornmeal, along with the 1918 gristmill, grapevine grain, homemade soap and sauerkraut making, egg noodle making, wine making, sausage stuffing, and Balcones Forge blacksmithing.
The noodles deserve their own paragraph. These are the Wendish noodles served at lunch, an egg-based dough sliced into strips so thin they look like wood shavings, cooked in chicken broth until they absorb the liquid into something wet and lightly flavored. Nobody knows when or why the Texas Wends invented them, since they do not come from the old country. They are a Lee County invention, full stop. If you have lived here your whole life and have never eaten one, that is a strange gap worth closing.
The other tradition to look for is smaller and easier to miss. The Birds' Wedding, or Ptači kwas in Wendish, is a custom the Wends brought to Texas, and visitors can see a children's reenactment at the Wendish Fest. It commemorates the start of bird-mating season and involves plates left on windowsills overnight to be filled with sweets. It is the kind of detail you cannot find at any other festival in the county.
Serbin is one anchor of a fall afternoon. Downtown Giddings is the other, and the version of downtown you visit this fall is not quite the one you visited last summer.
On April 2, 2026, an EF-0 tornado with winds up to 70 mph traveled roughly eight miles through rural parts of Lee County before dissipating over downtown Giddings, beginning six miles southwest of the city. Calls started coming in around 10:50 that morning per Interim City Manager Heather Garner, with damage reported primarily to trees, farm outbuildings, and some structures near Giddings.
Two of the places local residents rely on took direct hits. At Giddings Brewhaus, general manager Kyle Cheshire said the door slammed open about five minutes before the restaurant was set to open, and when he walked outside he found tables scattered, debris everywhere, and the outdoor TV under the patio shattered. A few blocks away, an employee at Reba's Diner described hearing wind and hail hit the walls and seeing pieces of roof fly by, and stood outside holding a piece of damaged signage.
Both places came back. That is the story worth telling this fall. If you have not made a point of eating at Reba's or grabbing a beer at the Brewhaus since April, this is the shoulder season to do it. The Brewhaus patio is where the county's slow-Sunday crowd tends to land after a Wendish Fest drive back into town, and if you time your day right you can eat drive-thru noodles at 10 AM in Serbin and burgers on a repaired patio in Giddings by dinner.
If you are pulling out-of-town family for the September weekend, or you simply want to spend a Saturday inside your own county for once, the working dining list is shorter than the internet suggests but more interesting than newcomers assume.
The core downtown and 290-corridor list, from what the Giddings Area Chamber and current review sites show open in 2026:
A small correction to the Yelp version of this list: Weikel's Bakery shows up on Giddings-area search results but sits over in Fayette County, so if you have driven visitors in from Austin, they get the kolache stop as a bonus on the way in, not as a Giddings destination. Locally, the equivalent early-morning stop is the drive-thru donut and kolache counter, not a bakery on the highway.
Between Wendish Fest on September 27 and the quieter run-up to the holidays, Lee County's public calendar is mostly Commissioners Court meetings. The county's own event feed shows Commissioners Court on August 10 and 24, Labor Day on September 7, and Commissioners Court again on September 14 and 28. That is not much on paper.
What is not on the county calendar is the rhythm most residents already run on. Friday-night football at Giddings and Lexington. Sunday services at St. Paul in Serbin, where the church built in 1871 sits a short walk from the museum complex and the festival grounds. The Giddings Times & News on the porch each week, the newspaper of record for the city with a weekly circulation of 5,000. Sausage suppers at country churches. The slow shift from watermelon on the porch to sweaters at the football game.
You do not need a blog to tell you those rhythms exist. You do, arguably, need a reminder that the one Sunday a year the rest of Texas comes to your county is coming up fast, and that the two places downtown that took a beating in April are back on their feet in time for it.
A working plan: eggs and a kolache in Giddings before 9. On CR 212 by 9:30 for the drive-thru meal line. Walk the grounds until early afternoon. Church tour if you missed the 8:30 service. Back to downtown Giddings by 3 for a beer at the Brewhaus patio. Home by dark, with a container of noodles for Monday.
That is the shape of a good Lee County Sunday in late September. It costs almost nothing. It puts you in the exact places the rest of Texas has to drive an hour to reach. And it hands you the one piece of local knowledge that separates people who live here from people who live near here.
If you are thinking about the rural life beyond the calendar, whether that is a small acreage outside Serbin, a home in Lexington, or a place with a little more room around Giddings, I am always happy to talk. Reach out to Caitlin Jacob any time. Let's Connect.
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