Cole Swindell Plays Beak and Skiff’s 1911 Stage Aug. 6 as LaFayette Opens a 66 Day Run to Its 53rd Apple Festival

Country singer Cole Swindell takes the 1911 Stage at Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards, 2708 Lords Hill Road in LaFayette, on Thursday, Aug. 6. Doors open at 5 p.m. and the show starts at 7 p.m., with Ethan Garner opening, according to the orchard’s event page. The general admission lawn holds 4,000 people, per venue information published by DSP Shows, the Ithaca based promoter that books the series.

The show does more than close out a summer of touring acts on a hillside apple farm. It opens the busiest 66 days on LaFayette’s calendar. Between Thursday night and Sunday, Oct. 11, this town of orchard rows and highway ramps hosts three lawn concerts, staffs a booth at the New York State Fair, opens its pick your own apple season, and stages the 53rd annual LaFayette Apple Festival, the two day event that draws more than 400 artisan vendors to Apple Valley Park. For a town whose official seal reads “The Crossroads of New York,” the next two months are the year’s main event.

Three shows in 18 days

Swindell’s stop is the first of three concerts remaining on the orchard’s 2026 Summer Concert Series calendar, all packed into 18 days.

Reggae rock act Slightly Stoopid brings its Road Trippin’ Summer Tour to the lawn on Sunday, Aug. 16, with doors at 6 p.m. and the show at 7 p.m. Support comes from Denm and Bumpin’ Uglies. Tickets for that date went on presale March 5 at 10 a.m. and on general sale March 6, sold exclusively through Tixr, according to the orchard’s event page. The venue posts a standing warning against third party resellers and notes that Beak & Skiff itself sells no VIP packages; any VIP offering comes directly from the artist.

The Indigo Girls close the season on Sunday, Aug. 23 at 7 p.m., with singer Trina Meade supporting. The LaFayette date is one of 39 upcoming shows on the duo’s tour schedule, according to concert tracker JamBase.

The series runs on a simple trade: a working farm lends its prettiest hillside to touring acts for a summer, and the crowds meet the orchard months before picking season. On show nights the 1911 Tasting Room, country store and cafe serve ticket holders, and the bar pours come from the farm’s own 1911 Established line of hard cider, spirits and wine.

A 115 year old company built for this pivot

The company throwing these concerts has been working the same hillside since 1911. That year a dairy farmer named Andrew Beak and an onion farmer named George Skiff, who met at a Syracuse farmers market, joined forces to enter the young commercial apple business and planted their first orchard along Route 20 in LaFayette, according to the company’s published history.

The history that followed reads like a timeline of American fruit farming. The partners expanded into wholesale in the 1920s and 1930s, supplying Victory, A&P and local grocers. They brought in smudge pots against frost in 1949, irrigation in 1951, and in 1956 became the first Northeast orchard to run wind machines for frost protection. Controlled atmosphere storage rooms arrived in 1960. In 1975 the family opened pick your own picking on Apple Hill and converted a dairy barn into the country store. Fresh cider with flash pasteurization followed in 1979. The 1911 Established hard cider line launched in 2001, and in 2010 the company started 1911 Spirits, its vodka and gin operation, becoming Onondaga County’s first distillery licensee by its own account. In 2013 the family planted roughly 15,000 new trees and renovated the Apple Hill Campus. A fifth generation of the family runs the operation today.

The outside world has noticed. USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice poll has named Beak & Skiff the best apple orchard in America five times in a decade: 2015, 2017, 2020, 2021 and 2024, according to CNY Central’s Sept. 19, 2024 report on the most recent win. The contest starts with 20 orchards nominated by a panel of 10Best experts and puts the winner to a public reader vote. CNY Central put the field in perspective: there are roughly 7,500 apple orchards in the United States.

The crossroads does the heavy lifting

Geography is the quiet partner in all of it. The orchard sits on Lords Hill Road at Route 80, and the town’s commercial spine runs along the U.S. Route 20 corridor where it crosses Route 11 and meets the Interstate 81 interchange. That crossroads, the one on the town seal, is what lets a hamlet level town park 4,000 concertgoers on a farm lawn on a Thursday night and send them home again. Town Hall itself sits at 2577 Route 11, and its posted schedule tells you what kind of town this is: open four weekdays, Tuesday evenings until 7 p.m., and closed on Fridays from May through October, when the growing season outranks the paperwork.

The concert crowd meets that geography twice: once at the I-81 exit by the Byrne Dairy corner on Route 20, and again on the two lane climb up Lords Hill Road to the orchard gate.

The town has budget level reasons to want the season to go well. In the town’s 2026 budget announcement, Supervisor Bill McConnell laid out the squeeze: overall general fund expenditures up approximately $95,000, health insurance premiums up 10 percent or about $45,000, and state pension contributions projected about 15 percent higher, an increase of roughly $20,000, all against a stated goal of staying under New York State’s 2 percent property tax cap. The letter runs deeper than the headline numbers. Library wages were expected to climb 17 percent on the back of the higher minimum wage. Mortgage recording tax revenue has been trending down and was projected to come in about $10,000 under 2025. And the 2025 budget leaned on roughly $88,000 in one time revenues that will not repeat. The board aired all of it publicly, with budget meetings on Sept. 8 and Sept. 22 ahead of a Nov. 6 public hearing, and McConnell’s letter credits the department heads with holding to the board’s 2 percent spending increase mandate.

The same letter names the stakes in plain terms: the Highway Department, the LaFayette Fire Department and the LaFayette Ambulance Service are the town’s largest services, the ambulance now funds a minimum of 100 hours of coverage per week, and fire vehicle maintenance costs climb every year as the equipment ages. A town carrying those bills enters its signature season with every reason to count the cars coming off the interstate.

From lawn chairs to bushel bags

The concerts end Aug. 23, and the farm barely gets a week off. Three days later, on Aug. 26, the New York State Fair opens in Geddes and runs through Sept. 7, with 1911 Beak and Skiff listed as a food vendor. The fairgrounds menu on the fair’s official vendor page covers burgers, smoked meats, wings and fries alongside hard cider, spirits, wine, New York State craft beer and CBD and cannabis beverages.

At almost the same moment, the orchard flips to its original business. The farm’s pick your own operation, closed since last fall according to its picking schedule page, reopens when the earliest varieties come off the trees. The published ripening calendar runs about 20 varieties deep: Ginger Gold and Paula Red lead in late August and early September, McIntosh follows in early to mid September, Gala, Honeycrisp and SnapDragon hit in mid September, Empire arrives in early October, and Pink Lady and EverCrisp close the season in early November. That calendar means the same lawn hosting Slightly Stoopid on Aug. 16 will have picking customers on the hill within about two weeks.

The music does not entirely stop either. It just moves indoors and gets smaller. The 1911 Tasting Room’s fall schedule lists Sam Vecchio on Sept. 12 from 2 to 4 p.m., McArdell & Westers on Oct. 17, and Bill Ali on Oct. 18, according to the orchard’s events calendar.

Then comes the festival

The stretch ends where LaFayette’s identity does: at the 53rd annual LaFayette Apple Festival, Saturday, Oct. 10 and Sunday, Oct. 11 at Apple Valley Park, 2444 Tully Farms Road. Festival hours run 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, with the apple pancake breakfast starting at 7 a.m. both days, according to the festival’s official site and the Discover Upstate NY events listing.

The scale is bigger than the town itself. Discover Upstate NY’s listing describes a craft fair with more than 400 artisan vendors, live music, a carnival midway, pony rides, a petting zoo, and farming and agriculture exhibits, built around fresh apples, cider, donuts and pies. The festival’s own site describes an event that brings together community groups, nonprofit organizations, artists and crafters “to promote apples, small town America, and obtain monies for future endeavors.” In a town this size, that fundraising weekend is the civic calendar’s anchor event.

The 2026 logistics are still filling in. Organizers say ticket sales, prices and dates will be announced later, vendor applications are open now through the festival site, and the festival office answers at 315-677-3498 or [email protected]. Anyone who wants a booth among those 400 plus vendors applies through the site’s vendor page.

For the vendors, the nonprofits and the town, the sequencing matters. The concert crowds of August introduce the hill. The State Fair booth carries the brand through Labor Day. The picking season runs the turnstiles from Ginger Gold to EverCrisp. And the festival converts all of it into the town’s signature weekend.

The next mile marker comes fast. Swindell plays Thursday at 7 p.m. Ginger Gold and Paula Red come off the trees in late August. And the 53rd Apple Festival opens its gates at 9 a.m. on Oct. 10.