Walk the WOW Trail on a weekday afternoon in October and you'll pass joggers, a few strollers, someone's off-leash dog cutting across the pavement near Opechee Bay, and then, just past Main Street, a cluster of people waiting for a table outside a building that used to sell train tickets. Nobody on that sidewalk is thinking about railroads. But the reason the trail exists, and the reason that particular building has a hostess stand instead of a ticket window, is the same reason: passenger rail service through Laconia ended in 1965, and the city never quite decided what to do with the corridor until it decided to do everything with it at once.
That's the thing about Laconia's fall. It doesn't organize itself around one big seasonal event the way some Lakes Region towns do around a single road or a single bandstand. It organizes itself around a strip of old railroad right-of-way that now does double duty as a recreation trail by day and a restaurant row by night, plus a farmers market winding down to its last few Saturdays and a 1914 theater a few blocks off Main Street picking up the slack once the outdoor season fades.
The Line That Never Really Closed
The WOW Trail gets its name from the three lakes visible along its route: Winnipesaukee, Opechee, and Winnisquam. It currently runs 4.3 miles from Elm Street in Lakeport to the Belmont town line, following the same corridor still leased to the Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad, which means walkers and cyclists share the view with an active excursion train rather than an abandoned one. The trail passes Bartlett Beach, crosses the Winnipesaukee River, and about half a mile from that crossing runs directly past the former Laconia B&M Railroad Station.
That station stopped selling tickets sixty-one years ago. What it didn't stop doing was sitting in the middle of downtown, at the exact point where a rail trail and a Main Street business district were always going to intersect. Today the building holds shops and restaurants, and it functions as one of the trail's few built-in rest stops between Lakeport and the Belmont line.
Where the Trail Turns Into a Dinner Reservation
A few blocks from that old depot, in Veterans Square, sits Laconia Local Eatery, a farm-to-table restaurant occupying its own former train depot building. The restaurant changed hands this spring in a story that's become local shorthand for how Laconia's downtown food scene actually works: less corporate turnover, more people who already knew each other trading responsibility.
Seth Wingate started waiting tables at Local Eatery part time in 2019, back when the restaurant's late founder Kevin Halligan was still running it. Halligan sold the business to Reuben Bassett, and Wingate stayed on, taking on more responsibility over the years until Bassett handed him ownership this April, according to reporting in the Laconia Daily Sun. Bassett still owns the building. Wingate brought back chef Kaylon Sweet, who had worked the line at Local Eatery years earlier and had since led kitchens at Hermit Woods Winery & Eatery in Meredith and Osteria Poggio in Center Harbor, to rebuild the menu around local farms.
That single restaurant isn't the whole story, though. It's the anchor of a cluster that's grown up around the same few downtown blocks. Depending on which night you're out, the rotation includes:
- Tavern 27, a Main Street standby known for its prime rib and outdoor seating
- The Junction Restaurant & Provisions
- Trillium Farm to Table
- Copper Kettle Tavern
- Gusto Italian
None of these sit directly on the trail's pavement. But they're all within easy walking distance of the point where the WOW Trail crosses Main Street, which means the same corridor that gets foot traffic for exercise in the afternoon gets foot traffic for dinner reservations by early evening. The trail doesn't loop back on itself the way a park path does. It's a straight line with an unusually dense restaurant cluster sitting at its midpoint.
The Market's Last Three Saturdays
Outdoor Laconia has one more countdown running alongside all this. The Market at Weirs, the Saturday farmers market at Weirs Community Park, runs its regular season from late May through the first Saturday in October, with five designated "Big Market Days" scattered through the summer that bring extra vendors and live music: May 23, July 4, August 1, September 5, and October 3.
By the third week of September, four of those five dates have already passed. What's left is the market's least busy stretch of ordinary Saturdays, Sept 19 and Sept 26, followed by one last Big Market Day on October 3 that closes out the season. If you've been meaning to catch the market at its liveliest, that first weekend of October is effectively the only Big Market Day left on the calendar, not the norm you'd expect from a summer market in full swing.
What's Playing While the Market Winds Down
As the farmers market thins out, the Colonial Theatre picks up. The building itself is worth knowing regardless of what's on stage: it opened in 1914, designed by architect George I. Griffin and modeled after a theater in Venice, complete with a fire curtain that originally depicted the city as seen from the water. The city renovated it in 2015 in partnership with the Belknap Economic Development Council, and it had its full reopening, restored to its original look with modern production capability, in July 2021. It now seats 761.
The fall lineup gives residents a reason to head downtown even after the leaves are gone and the market tables are packed up:
| Show | Dates |
|---|---|
| Peter and the Starcatcher | October 9 through 11 |
| Michael Jackson HIStory Show | Later in October |
| Tusk, a Fleetwood Mac tribute | November |
| A Christmas Carol | Multiple performances across the first two weekends of December |
A building that hosted vaudeville acts in 1914 is now hosting Broadway touring productions and classic rock tribute bands on the same stage, a few blocks from a railroad depot that no longer sells tickets but still seats you for dinner.
Same Corridor, Two Different Clocks
None of this is coordinated. Nobody scheduled the market's last Big Market Day to align with the Colonial's October lineup, and the trail wasn't built with restaurant reservations in mind. But that's exactly what makes Laconia's fall distinct from towns where everything really does run through one calendar. Here, the old rail corridor supports a walking trail on one clock and a dining scene on another, while a farmers market on its own countdown and a century-old theater on its own booking schedule both sit within a few minutes' walk of that same stretch of track.
If you live here, you've probably already noticed pieces of this without connecting them. The dog walk that ends near Veterans Square. The dinner reservation that happens to be in an old depot. The theater tickets you bought for a Friday show without registering that the building predates the trail, the restaurant, and the market by more than a century. Fall in Laconia doesn't ask you to pick one thing to do. It just asks you to notice that most of what you're already doing happens along the same quarter mile of former railroad.
If you're thinking about what it would mean to put down roots along that same stretch of Laconia, or anywhere else in the Lakes Region, Cisneros Realty Group knows this ground well enough to talk through it honestly. Schedule a Call when you're ready.
