Historic Bethel Missouri Will Host Annual Fall Event

Historic Bethel will host it’s annual Bethel Fall Market on Saturday, September 27, 2025.

This year features a Missouri Arts Council Guest Lecturer, Steve Wiegenstein, who will be giving a presentation on Missouri’s Utopian Communities. From Bethel in the north to Carthage in the south, nineteenth-century Missouri was home to a number of intentional communities designed to achieve an ideal social order, a planned alternative to the ordinary modes of life. This presentation describes Missouri’s well-known and little-known utopias, both religious and secular, and includes biographical sketches and anecdotes about some of the colorful and eccentric figures who founded them. Steve grew up in the Missouri Ozarks and worked there as a newspaper reporter before entering the field of higher education.

For nearly 20 years, he was a professor of communication at Culver-Stockton College in Canton. He is now retired from teaching and writes full-time. Steve received the Missouri Author Award from the Missouri Library Association in 2022.

The Fall Market will also feature live music by Dutch Whitaker and The Music Doctors, a guided historic home tour, demonstrations by a blacksmith, rug hooker, and weaver, chili cook-off competition, and plenty of food and vendors of all kinds.

Event hours are 9am to 4pm; admission is free.

Find out more at historicbethel.org.