If you live inside the 52045, you already know the trick about the last weekend in July: you don't have to leave. The rest of Dubuque County drives in for Town & Country Days, and the couple of blocks around Main Street and Tower Park become the reason. What's changed in the last few years is what happens on the other 51 weekends, and how much of a Saturday a resident can now assemble without pointing the car toward Highway 20.
This post is a walk through that weekend, built specifically for someone who already owns a house here. The names, the addresses, the hours — the kind of detail you only want if you actually live within walking distance of the splash pad.
The Thursday-Through-Saturday Spine
The anchor is Epworth Town & Country Days, kicking off Thursday, July 30, 2026 from 4:00 to 11:00 p.m. on Main Street. That's the official schedule per the Governor's office event listing, and it lines up with the way the festival has run in recent years: a Thursday opener, a Friday night at Tower Park, and a Saturday that swallows the whole downtown.
Here is the shape of it, drawn from prior-year Telegraph Herald coverage and the festival's own page:
- Thursday evening: Silker Store steak fry from 5 to 8 p.m. with music, per the Epworth Town & Country Days event page
- Friday: an all-day ice cream social at Fidelity Bank, followed by evening music at Tower Park with food and beverage vendors, following the pattern the Telegraph Herald has documented year after year
- Saturday: a 10:30 a.m. parade, a 1 p.m. live auction, wiffle ball and a slip-n-slide, and live music in the park from 3 to 5 p.m.
- Saturday night downtown: a BBQ cookoff starting at 5:00 and a street dance with alternating performances from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.
If you've lived here long enough, this reads as pattern rather than news. What's worth flagging for anyone building a plan around it: the festival is a two-shift day on Saturday. Morning through mid-afternoon is family. Evening is the BBQ cookoff and the dance. If you have people staying with you, that gap between 5 and 6 p.m. is when you can walk them home for a shower and still be back for the second half.
What Filled In Around The Festival
The bigger change over the last few years is that the festival isn't the only reason to stay in town on a Saturday anymore. A stretch of Main Street has quietly picked up the kind of Main-Street-adjacent businesses that most Epworth residents used to drive to Dubuque or Dyersville for.
Locals Bar & Coffee Shop opened at 107 W. Main St. in May, started by Dan and Angie Kramer, who wanted a community gathering place in a town of about 2,000 where people could come together, get a drink and socialize. That "coffee shop in the morning, bar in the evening" format matters more than it sounds, because it means the same address handles a Saturday breakfast crowd and a Saturday night crowd without either group needing to be somewhere else.
A block east, the joint storefronts of Route 20 Boutique at 103 E. Main St. and Plein De Vie Wellness at 101 E. Main St. brought new products and services to the small town when they opened together. Add in Rosie's Coffee House, Ace's Place, and The Pizza Factory at 104 N Center Ave, open 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. most days, and you have a walkable loop that didn't exist a decade ago.
The other retail addition worth naming, if only because it changed a lot of household grocery runs: Dollar General opened at 102 Conlan Way. It's not a food scene story, but it is the kind of thing a resident writing an honest post about their own town has to include, because it's where the "quick trip for something forgotten" now ends instead of a fifteen-minute drive.
The Places That Aren't On The Festival Map
Every "what to do this weekend" piece written by someone outside Epworth stops at Main Street. A resident's version has to include the other half of the map.
The Heritage Trail trailhead sits 1 mile north of Epworth, the same route that follows the 26-mile path of a once bustling railroad into a 450-foot valley past old mining and mill towns. In late July that's a pre-8 a.m. walk if you want shade. Bring water. The trail is genuinely quiet on Town & Country Days weekend because everyone who would otherwise be on it is on Main Street.
Closer in, the splash pad at Tower Park is open daily from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, and Tower Park itself is the playground and picnic facility with pavilion and grills at the center of town, with pavilion rentals handled at City Hall. If you have grandkids in town for the weekend, this is where they go between the parade and dinner. The Bark Park sits on the north side of Centennial Park at 501 1st Ave NE, with a breed restriction of no pit bull or pit bull mix breeds, which is the kind of detail a first-time-visitor site never gets right.
The Epworth Branch of the Dubuque County Library at 110 Bierman Road runs weekly summer programming, with kids drop-ins offering snacks, crafts, and games for ages 5 to 12. It's not glamorous, but for a resident with a school-age kid, it's the answer to "what are we doing between 3 and 4 on a Tuesday" for most of July.
Building A Saturday If You've Never Actually Done It That Way
Here is a version of the last-Saturday-of-July that assumes you live inside walking distance of Tower Park. Adjust the timing to your own household.
Morning coffee at Locals or Rosie's, then the parade at 10:30 on Main Street. Home for a lunch you didn't cook, because the ice cream social pattern from prior Town & Country Days means Fidelity Bank has been handing out sundaes for hours. Back to Tower Park in the afternoon for the wiffle ball and the auction. If it's hot, the splash pad is doing overtime. Slip-n-slide is on the schedule, and it is genuinely for the kids.
A useful way to think about the day: the morning belongs to the parade route, the afternoon belongs to Tower Park, and the evening belongs to Main Street. You don't have to pick.
Around 5, the BBQ cookoff starts downtown. Somewhere between 6 and 7 you decide whether you're a dinner-at-home household or a Pizza Factory household. Around 9, the street dance is loud enough that your porch counts as attendance whether you meant it to or not.
That's the weekend. It works because the pieces are within a ten-minute walk of each other, and it works better the longer you've lived here, because you know which corner of Tower Park has shade at 2 p.m.
One Note For Anyone Watching Property In Epworth
This is a lifestyle post rather than a market update, but a small observation from the housing side is worth naming for residents who follow it. The reason listings in Epworth have held their appeal through 2026, based on public listing data across the county, is not the individual homes. It's the walkable core: a downtown that has added rather than lost businesses in the last three years, a splash pad and playground within stroller distance, a trailhead a mile north, and one weekend a year where the town is genuinely the destination. Those are the things a comparable-priced listing in a less-organized small town cannot match, and they show up in how long Epworth homes tend to attract interest from buyers already living in Dubuque County. If you own here, the festival weekend is a decent time to notice what your neighborhood does that others don't.
If You Want To Talk About Any Of This
If you're an Epworth homeowner thinking about what a move up, a downsize, or an investment property might look like over the next year, or if you're just curious what your current home would list for in this market, Jim Dix is happy to have a low-pressure conversation. No pitch, no timeline pressure. Just a straight read on your options from someone who covers this corner of Dubuque County every week. Let's Connect.
