Saturday morning, the gates at 35 Alma Street South open at 9 a.m. and by early afternoon there will be a beer garden going, a row of polished classic cars catching the light, and a Wild West act doing something with horses that most people in Hagersville have never seen live before. This is the 17th Annual Summer's End Festival, run the same way it's been run for years by the Hagersville Lions, and if you live here you probably already have it on the calendar without needing to think much about where you're going. It's Sgt. Andrew Harnett Memorial Park. Most years, that's just the address.

It wasn't always the name of the park, and the reason it became the name says something about how this town actually handles the space between celebration and memory. That's worth fifteen minutes of your Saturday even if you've been coming to this festival since before it had that name at all.

The Name Wasn't Always There

The park earned its current name on September 3, 2022, during that year's Summer's End Festival. Andrew Harnett grew up in Hagersville, spent three years as a Military Police Officer at the Edmonton Garrison, then served twelve years with the Calgary Police Service before he was killed in the line of duty. He was 37. Rob Philips of the Hagersville Chamber of Commerce presided over the dedication that afternoon, telling the crowd that Harnett led a life of service, dedication, and principle.

What's easy to miss, four festivals later, is that the town didn't hold a separate, solemn ceremony for this. It folded the dedication directly into the same afternoon as the beer garden and the car show. Harnett's mother, Valerie, was the one who framed why: Summer's End is a happy time, and the family wanted happiness present at the dedication rather than a hushed, separate occasion carved out for grief alone.

That decision is the whole story here. The park now carries four points of memorial: an entrance sign, a storyboard sponsored by Haldimand Norfolk Crime Stoppers, a bench, and a planted tree. None of them ask you to stop having fun. They just sit there, permanently, inside the same green space where kids will be running around a bounce castle this weekend and where the Lions will be pouring drinks under a tent.

Two Kinds of Afternoon in the Same Park

This matters for how you experience the park the other 364 days of the year too, not just during the festival. Sgt. Andrew Harnett Memorial Park isn't a war memorial set apart from daily life, the kind of green space you visit specifically to be solemn. It's the park where Hagersville's summer sends itself off. It's also, per local event listings, where the town's Remembrance Day service is held each November. One address, doing double duty as both the town's most festive gathering and one of its most quietly serious ones.

If you've lived in Hagersville a while, you've probably walked past that storyboard on your way to the food trucks without reading it closely. That's not a criticism. It's what the family wanted. The point wasn't to make people somber. It was to make the memory permanent and let ordinary life, including a Lions Club festival with a beer garden, keep happening around it.

This Year's Version

For 2026, the festival runs its usual shape with one new headline addition. Here's what's actually on for Saturday, September 5, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

• Tom Bishop's Wild West Show — the featured new attraction this year, bringing horses and cowboy performance to the park, and the piece organizers are pointing to as the thing that'll set 2026 apart from past years
• A classic car show, a fixture of the festival for years
• Live bands and performances running throughout the day
• Free food, arts and crafts, and family activities
• A Lions silent auction, which has quietly funded a lot of what the Lions do in this town over the years

Admission is free, as it's been every year. The Lions built this to be something anyone in town can walk into without planning around cost, and that's held.

The Rest of the Calendar Doesn't Pause

Summer's End isn't the only thing on Hagersville's fall calendar, and looking at what surrounds it tells you something about who actually runs the events that make up daily life here. It's rarely the municipality. It's the Lions, the churches, the volunteer fire association, and local farms.

Two weeks after the festival, on September 19, Hagersville United Church is hosting Crop for a Cause, a fundraising event that's become a regular fixture on the town's fall calendar. Earlier this summer, Beischlag Farms carved a walking path through a field of sunflowers as a scenic, charitable draw for Sip for Sunflowers, giving Haldimand residents a reason to make the drive out for something other than produce.

Meanwhile, the Hagersville Hawks kicked off late-summer training camp on August 25, which means the town's other major fall rhythm, junior hockey in the Provincial Junior Hockey League, is already gearing up behind the scenes even while the festival takes the spotlight this weekend. By the time the leaves are properly turning, Hagersville residents will be trading one crowd, gathered around a car show and a beer garden, for another one filing into arena seats on Friday nights.

None of these events run through a city department. They run through people who live here organizing things for people who live here, which is a smaller-scale version of the same instinct that led a family to ask the Lions if a memorial could share space with a festival instead of standing apart from it.

What the Same Address Adds Up To

You don't need to know any of this to enjoy Saturday. The Wild West show will go on, the wings from the food vendors will taste the same, and the kids will still find the bounce castle. But if you do know it, the park reads differently. Every year the Lions run this festival, they're running it on ground the town deliberately chose to keep two things true at once: that this is a place for a good afternoon, and that it's also the place where Hagersville decided a life worth remembering should live in the middle of daily life rather than off to the side of it.

That's a small thing to carry into a Saturday at the park. It's also, in a town this size, kind of the whole point. Hagersville doesn't set aside a separate day for what matters. It builds it into the one everyone already shows up for.

If you're weighing what small-town life here actually looks like day to day, not just on a festival weekend but across a Haldimand County calendar that runs on volunteers and neighbors more than institutions, Ryan Jenkins has spent years working in these communities and is always glad to talk through what a place like Hagersville is really like to live in. Let's Connect.