On Monday this week, Visit Kingsport confirmed that Racks by the Tracks, the barbecue and beer festival that had anchored the city's fall calendar for 18 years, is gone for good. No reason given, no farewell tour, just a short statement thanking the vendors and competitors who showed up year after year. The very next day, Hull Property Group told the Kingsport Development Board that Tiebreakers, the arcade-style entertainment concept that already runs a location in Johnson City, is opening a second one inside Fort Henry Mall. It's expected to create about 100 jobs and follows the mall's IMAX theater, the only one in the region, which opened earlier this summer.
Nobody at either announcement connected the two events. But if you live here and you're wondering what your Saturdays look like this fall, the connection is the whole story. Kingsport isn't losing its social calendar. It's relocating it, from a free street festival on Main Street to a paid entertainment complex off Fort Henry Drive, and from one unifying tradition to a stack of smaller, competing events that don't always leave room for each other.
The Festival That Isn't Coming Back
Racks by the Tracks started at the actual railroad tracks on Main Street and became, over 18 years, one of those events that didn't need much explanation if you'd lived here more than a summer. Barbecue teams competed, breweries poured, bands played, and according to organizers the festival raised more than $150,000 for local nonprofits and drew tens of thousands of people over its run.
The strange part is the timing. Just six months before the cancellation, Visit Kingsport announced the festival was moving back to its original Main Street location after several years at the Kingsport Farmers Market, and shifting from its old summer slot to a new October date. Emily Thompson with Visit Kingsport talked at the time about wanting to "freshen it up" and return the event "back to our roots." That version of Racks by the Tracks was scheduled for October 10, 2026. It never happened. This week, organizers confirmed the whole thing was ending, not just pausing, with no future date planned and no public explanation for why a festival that had just been reworked for a comeback was instead being shut down entirely.
If you've been going to Racks by the Tracks since you were a kid, or since you moved here, the gap it leaves isn't really about barbecue. It's about the one weekend a year when a huge cross section of Kingsport showed up to the same free outdoor event at the same time. That kind of shared, no-ticket-required gathering is harder to replace than it sounds, and nothing announced this fall replaces it directly.
What Fort Henry Mall Is Becoming Instead
Fort Henry Mall has spent the last several years with the same problem a lot of American malls have: too much retail square footage and not enough retailers willing to fill it. John Mulherin, senior vice president of government relations for Hull Property Group, put it plainly to a local reporter when Tiebreakers was announced: there's a national mismatch between how much space a mall like this has and how many tenants actually want it, and the fix his company has landed on is entertainment rather than retail.
That strategy started with the region's only IMAX theater this summer and now continues with Tiebreakers, which company officials say is still in the early stages of development. Tiebreakers founder and CEO Eric Hensley described the Kingsport location as building on "the momentum IMAX has already brought to Fort Henry Mall" and said it would be bigger than the company's existing Johnson City location. Mulherin has said the partnership with the City of Kingsport was central to making the redevelopment work, and that the mall is now in preliminary talks with other businesses about joining the lineup.
Read that as a resident and it says something specific about where Kingsport's version of a night out is heading. A movie at the mall's IMAX, an evening at Tiebreakers once it opens, these are ticketed, indoor, national-brand experiences built around individual purchases rather than a single shared civic event. That's not a criticism of the mall's strategy, which appears to be working by the property owner's own account of the redevelopment. It's just a different shape of gathering place than a Main Street barbecue festival, and it's the one Fort Henry Mall is now betting its future on.
The Same Saturday, Two Different Festivals
The fragmentation shows up most clearly on September 26. That Saturday, at 10 a.m., Kingsport has two separate fall folk festivals happening at the same time in different parts of town. The Folkfest Fall Shindig is set for 140 Broad Street downtown, and the Exchange Place Fall Folk Arts Festival is happening the same morning at Exchange Place's 1850s farm site. Both are genuinely local, both draw on the same rough audience of people who like live music, crafts, and a fall outdoor gathering, and both are asking that audience to pick one.
That kind of overlap didn't used to matter as much when Racks by the Tracks gave the fall calendar one obvious anchor everyone built around. Without it, Kingsport's fall traditions are more numerous but also more scattered, which means residents are doing more scheduling work to catch the version of fall they actually want.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
Pulling from what's confirmed and dated right now, here's what fills in around that September 26 conflict:
- September 4: Scenic Planetarium Yoga at Bays Mountain Park, 10 a.m., inside the park's planetarium dome.
- Sundays through the fall: A casual run and walk group meets downtown at 10 a.m., open to any pace or distance.
- Wednesdays: Creative Night at Inspire Wine Bar downtown, 4 to 9 p.m., for anyone bringing their own craft or work in progress.
- September 13: The Pink Bride Wedding and Women's Expo takes over MeadowView Conference Resort at noon.
- September 19: The Tri-Cities Card Show, also at MeadowView, starting at 9 a.m.
- September 25 and 26: The second annual Tennessee Lit Con brings roughly 100 authors and 20 vendors to MeadowView.
- November 5: Wing Fling returns, with $20 tickets in advance through KPTWingFling.com or the Kingsport Chamber, rising to $25 the day of. A panel of first responders from Kingsport Fire, Kingsport Police, Sullivan County EMS, and the Sullivan County Sheriff's Office judges the entries, including a new "ZachBites Favorite Flavor" award this year.
- December 19: The second annual Hearth & Holiday Christmas Market lands at the Kingsport Farmers Market.
There's also a quieter thread running under all of it. The Dobyns-Bennett High School Band is marking its 100th anniversary this year, a milestone the Times-News notes has been shaped by nine different directors over the century. It's the kind of centennial that says something about how long some Kingsport institutions have actually been building loyalty in this town, which makes the sudden end of an 18-year festival land differently by comparison. Downtown Kingsport Association also keeps a Shop & Hop Passport available, encouraging people to actually walk into the antique shops, restaurants, and small storefronts that make up the downtown core, rather than just driving past them.
The Version of Fall You're Actually Choosing
None of this means Kingsport is losing its social life. It means the social life is redistributing, away from one guaranteed, free, outdoor weekend that the whole city organized around, and toward a wider spread of ticketed events, mall entertainment, and overlapping niche festivals that ask residents to actively choose rather than just show up. If you've noticed your fall feels busier but somehow less unified, that's not a coincidence. It's what happens when an 18-year anchor event disappears in the same stretch of weeks that a mall pivots hard toward becoming the region's entertainment destination.
Whichever version of this fall you end up building, whether that's Wing Fling in November or a Saturday morning deciding between two folk festivals, it's worth paying attention to how these local shifts play out. They tend to say something honest about where a town is headed, long before it shows up in any official report.
If you're watching Kingsport for reasons beyond the fall calendar, whether that's a move you're considering or just curiosity about how the town is changing, The Lusk Team knows this market from the inside. Let's Connect.
