Drive west on Route 125 past the third weekend of September and you will hit a line of parked trucks, a pavilion, and a scatter of white tents outside a brick inn that predates the town around it by half a century. If you have lived here a while, the Clayville Fall Festival is just what happens that weekend. Kids dip candles. Someone is churning butter. A guy with a bullwhip does tricks for the crowd. You have probably been a dozen times and stopped reading the historical markers years ago.
Here is the part that gets lost in the routine: that inn was one signature away from becoming a parking lot.
The building almost didn't make it
The Broadwell Inn is the oldest brick building in Sangamon County and the second oldest in Illinois, put up in 1824 by John Broadwell as a stagecoach stop on the road between Springfield and the Illinois River port at Beardstown. Broadwell was a Whig, admired Henry Clay enough to name the little settlement after him, and ran in the same circles as a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who represented Broadwell in at least four cases according to surviving legal records. The railroad killed the tavern business by the 1850s, the stagecoach road eventually became Route 125, and Clayville the settlement stopped existing. Only the brick building stayed standing.
It made the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, which sounds like a happy ending but was not one. The inn was sold into private ownership in 1992, sat there for fifteen years, and in 2007 Landmarks Illinois put it on the state's list of ten most endangered historic sites. That designation exists for buildings that are about to be lost, not ones that are merely old.
A rescue, not a restoration
What happened next is the part worth knowing if you live two miles from the site and have never once wondered how it got its pavilion. In 2009, a Pleasant Plains resident named Jim Verkuilen organized what became the Pleasant Plains Historical Society, with the specific goal of buying Clayville before someone else did something worse with the land. The purchase closed in 2010. Two years later, Landmarks Illinois, the same organization that had flagged the site as endangered, gave the Historical Society its advocacy award for pulling it back.
That is not a museum board with an endowment. It is a volunteer group that bought a 200-year-old building with money it had to raise, and has been raising it every year since through four recurring events: a spring festival, a summer folk music gathering, the fall festival, and a haunted house event later in the season. There is no other funding mechanism holding the roof on. The festivals are the budget.
Understanding that changes what the third weekend of September actually is. It is not a craft fair that happens to be set against old buildings. It is the fundraising cycle that keeps those buildings from going back on an endangered list.
What's actually happening on Route 125 this year
The 2026 Clayville Fall Festival runs September 19 and 20. Recent years have followed a consistent format, and there is no indication this one departs from it.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Dates | September 19 to 20, 2026 |
| Format | Full days both Saturday and Sunday, start times have run 9 or 10 a.m. in past years |
| Location | Clayville Historic Site, Route 125, Pleasant Plains |
| Hosted by | Pleasant Plains Historical Society |
| Admission model | Vendor and gate proceeds fund year-round site upkeep |
Past festivals have run on the same bones: the Broadwell Inn open for tours, blacksmiths and tinsmiths working in the outbuildings, weaving and pottery demonstrations in the log cabins, kids dipping candles and making yarn dolls, and an agricultural museum in one of the barns that includes artifacts as specific as an item tied to the Donner party. Civil War reenactors from units including the 10th Illinois Infantry Regiment have set up camp on the grounds in past years, and Chris Camp, known locally as the Whip Guy, has been a recurring performer. Local news coverage from 2018 noted the site had just added a new pavilion, which tells you the event outgrew its original footprint rather than shrinking to fit it.
None of that requires a ticket purchased in advance or a drive to Springfield. It is happening on the same road most residents already use to get to Casey's.
The other fundraiser, two weeks later
If the Historical Society's calendar were the only nonprofit ask in town this fall, that would already be a pattern worth naming. It is not. On October 4, the Pleasant Plains Community Club is running its own pancake breakfast fundraiser from 8 a.m. to noon at 206 W. 4th Street, suggested donation ten dollars, with pancakes, sausage patties, hashbrowns, biscuits and gravy on the menu. That is a separate volunteer organization, a separate building, and a separate cause, landing two weeks after Clayville wraps up.
Two unrelated civic groups running fundraising events two weekends apart in a village of roughly 809 residents is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is what keeping shared spaces open actually costs in a town this size. There is no tax base large enough to carry a historic tavern or a community club building on its own. The people who show up and buy a plate of pancakes or a festival vendor's craft are the mechanism, not a bonus feature of the event.
Where to eat before or after either one
If you are making a day of either fundraiser, the choice most residents already default to is the Grainery on West Route 125, ranked the top restaurant in Pleasant Plains on Tripadvisor and known specifically for the horseshoe, a central Illinois specialty built from a slab of meat over toast or fries, smothered in a beer cheese sauce. It looks like a roadside bar from the outside and eats like a family restaurant inside, which is exactly the kind of place that does not need a review to tell you it is good if you already live here. For something faster, Cool Beans Coffee & Ice Cream sits along the same stretch of Route 125 as the rest of the town's small business row, alongside Casey's General Store for the quick stop.
None of this is a discovery. It is confirmation that the town's daily loop, the historic site two miles out, the restaurant strip on Route 125, the community club a few blocks off Main, all runs on the same short list of names it always has. What changes is what that loop is actually paying for.
The argument, in one line
Pleasant Plains does not host a fall festival because old buildings photograph well in September light. It hosts one because a group of residents already had to save the Broadwell Inn once, and the festival is how they keep from having to do it again. Showing up this year is not a tourist decision. It is the same maintenance the town has been doing since 2009, and it works because enough people keep treating a Saturday on Route 125 as worth the drive.
If you already call Pleasant Plains home and have been thinking about what a move within the area, or a sale, might look like down the road, Land & Home Real Estate has spent years working this exact stretch of central Illinois. Reach out anytime to request a property valuation and talk through what your options actually look like here.
