This Saturday afternoon, at 2 p.m., storyteller Sarah Brady will take a small stage at the International Storytelling Center for an hour-long session that requires no shuttle, no parking fee, and no reservation made months in advance. Three weeks later, the crowds arrive. Main Street closes to cars, five tents go up around downtown, and a car with out-of-state plates pulls into a gravel lot on Forest Drive to catch a shuttle it will ride for the next three days.
Both of these are Jonesborough telling stories. Only one of them is the version most people mean when they say "storytelling festival." The other one has been running quietly since June, mostly for free or close to it, mostly built by and for the town itself, and it says more about what Jonesborough actually is than the ticketed weekend that gets all the attention every October.
What's actually closing, and for how long
The 53rd National Storytelling Festival runs October 2 through 4, 2026. A festival ticket covers the tent concerts downtown from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, according to the International Storytelling Center's own festival FAQ. Ghost Stories, After Hours, and the Thursday workshops are separate tickets on top of that.
For residents who plan to drive rather than walk in, the logistics are specific enough to write down:
- Parking opens Friday at 306 Forest Drive, off US-11E, about 0.8 miles from Festival Registration at the Visitors Center.
- The lot costs $5 per car, and the money benefits the David Crockett Band Boosters and the Jonesborough Elementary PTA.
- A shuttle runs a continuous loop starting at 8:30 a.m. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for $1 per person each way. Kids five and under ride free.
- Group tickets for 10 or more people have to be registered by Friday, September 18.
- Pets aren't allowed on festival grounds, service animals excepted.
That's the version of the weekend that shows up on every travel site and every out-of-town visitor's itinerary. It's accurate, and it's also the least interesting thing happening in town this fall.
The show that's been running longer than the festival, and costs less
Since June, the Jackson Theatre and the McKinney Center have been staging a series called Tales of Our 250th, built around America's semiquincentennial and Jonesborough's own founding-era history. It runs through October. It's Pay What You Can. And it has quietly turned into the more locally specific of the two storytelling seasons happening in town this year.
Each installment weaves in scenes from an original play, The First and Last Town in Tennessee, written by Anne G'Fellers-Mason and first staged at the McKinney Center earlier this year. That play was picked up by The New York Times, which is not a sentence that gets written about most small-town history theater series.
Date | Show | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
July 23 | Revolutionary War-era show | Willie Jones (the town's namesake), Jesse Walton, John Sevier, and the Overmountain Men, plus a presentation from Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park |
August 20 | "The Road to Freedom" | The play Nancy, about an enslaved woman connected to abolitionist publisher Elihu Embree, followed by a concert from the Friendship Baptist Church Mass Choir |
September 24 | "The Lost State of Franklin" | Jonesborough's brief 18th-century run as capital of a state that never got admitted to the Union |
That last one is two weeks out from today, and it lands a full ten days before the festival tents even go up.
The August installment is worth sitting with. Nancy was built from research pulled directly from the Washington County Archives, following the year between when Elihu Embree wrote his will in January 1820 trying to free an enslaved woman and her five children, and when that will was read before the Washington County court in January 1821. Embree is also the reason Jonesborough has a genuinely unusual claim to make: his newspaper, The Emancipator, printed right on Main Street, was the first publication in the world dedicated solely to abolitionism. That fact rarely makes it into the festival marketing, and it's arguably the more consequential piece of history than anything happening in a tent three weeks from now.
The rest of the calendar that doesn't ask for a ticket
Music on the Square has been running Friday evenings, 7 to 9 p.m., since May 1, and continues through September 25, just ahead of the festival crowds. This month already brought out Donnie and the Dryheavers on September 4, with Larry & Joe booked next for September 18, spanning genres from bluegrass to Americana to blues. Parking is free downtown, food comes from rotating trucks and the restaurants already lining Main Street, and nobody needs a wristband to bring a lawn chair.
Brews & Tunes has covered Sunday afternoons through the same stretch, food and drinks starting at 4 p.m. in front of the International Storytelling Center, with music from 5 to 7. The Center's own campus, at 100 W. Main, includes the Mary B. Martin Storytelling Hall, Jimmy Neil Smith Storytelling Park, and the historic Chester Inn, none of which require an October ticket to visit on an ordinary Tuesday.
Sarah Brady's run of Storytelling Live sessions, including this Saturday's, sits inside a program the Center runs May through October, well outside the three festival days that get the headline treatment.
Why the distinction matters if you actually live here
The festival is a three-day event built for people traveling in, some from more than ten hours away by car. The parking plan, the shuttle loop, the group ticket deadline, all of it is scaffolding for visitors. That's not a criticism. It brings real money and real attention to a small Appalachian town that spends the rest of the year mostly to itself.
But the theater series at the Jackson Theatre, the Friday concerts on the square, the Sunday afternoons in front of the Storytelling Center, and a session with a working storyteller on a random Saturday in September are built at a different scale entirely. They're Pay What You Can or free. They don't require a shuttle. They were assembled by the McKinney Center, the Historic Jonesborough Arts Foundation, and local sponsors like McLeod Organics, not by an operation selling tickets to people flying in from out of state.
If the only version of "storytelling season" on your radar is the first weekend in October, you've been catching the part of the story built for tourists and missing the part built for you. The Lost State of Franklin show on September 24 and Sarah Brady's session this Saturday are both closer, cheaper, and arguably more particular to this specific town than anything happening under the five tents three weeks later.
That's a small thing to know about a place. It's also the kind of thing you only pick up by paying attention to a town for longer than a festival weekend, which is exactly how people who end up loving a place usually get there.
If you're already living that kind of attention to Jonesborough, or thinking about what it would take to put down roots here permanently, The Lusk Team knows this town beyond the festival crowds. Let's Connect.
