For years, a weekend in 44408 meant picking a side. You drove out to Firestone Farms for dinner and a concert, or you stayed on Main Street for the antique shops and the Street Fair. The two ends of town ran on separate clocks. That's the assumption to update. Between the Street Fair, Market on Main, Concerts in the Courtyard, and a wave of new tenants filling in the blocks between them, Columbiana's downtown and its TownCenter have started operating as a single continuous weekend. September is where a resident actually feels it.
The September Anchor Everyone Knows
The 139th Annual Columbiana Street Fair runs September 10, 11, and 12, 2026, with the parade stepping off from Firestone Park on Thursday evening. If you have lived here more than a year, the mechanics are familiar. Kissel Amusement Company runs the midway, and the American Legion runs the lot. What has shifted is the surrounding calendar.
Nine days after the last funnel cake, the September edition of Market on Main takes over the same stretch of pavement. Market on Main dates for 2026 are May 16, June 27, July 25, September 19, and November 7, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and the September installment is themed Harvest Days. The event includes live music, food and drinks, and over 80 vendors, and the owner of an antique shop on Main Street started it last year to give a platform to small businesses in the area. The organizers are Taylor Harvey of Magnolia & Co. and Zhenya Motry of Columbiana Vintage, both operating storefronts within a block of where their vendors set up.
That's the thing worth naming. A festival organized by shopkeepers on the street they already work on hits different than a festival trucked in from outside. The vendor stalls flow directly into the permanent stores, and the permanent stores stay open late.
What Filled In Between the Two Anchors
If you skipped downtown for a few months, the storefront math is different than you remember. The city registered 16 new businesses in 2025, along with 22 food trucks and 128 contractors, with commercial investment accounting for more than $14.5 million between new construction, signs, roofing, demolition and others. Zoning permits alone crossed 200. That volume shows up on the sidewalk as new signage, longer evening hours, and a handful of concepts that did not exist during last year's Street Fair.
The one to watch on Main Street:
- The Columbiana Tap House, planned for 135 S. Main St. later this year, with the operator awaiting a liquor license. The format is genuinely new for the block. The plan is 30 self-serve taps of craft beers, wines and non-alcoholic beverages such as sodas, with an RFID wristband allowing patrons to activate any of the 30 offerings and pay differently per ounce based on the beverage, and children's wristbands restricting them to kid-friendly choices. Owner Tony Marshall has been explicit about the audience: "you come there with the family, you come with the dog, you come with the kids. You have a beer or wine and the kids are able to participate too."
- Red Brick Commons, the DeMaiolo Development project at Firestone Farms, is adding capacity in the same window. The latest phase is two identical 11,000-square-foot commercial buildings where eight to 12 tenants will operate, with three letters of intent already signed.
- Existing Red Brick tenants already worth folding into a Saturday: Sespe Burger, Pulp Juice & Smoothie, Columbiana Barbershop, Kingdom Tattoos, and Axio Fitness, per the center's directory.
Two things happen when a Tap House with a family-and-dog policy opens two blocks from a monthly vintage market run by the shop owners next door. The dwell time on Main Street stretches from lunch to dinner. And the reason to drive back to Firestone Farms for the evening becomes optional rather than automatic.
The Firestone Farms Side of the Weekend
That said, the TownCenter is still doing its own programming, and September is not a light month. Firestone Farms runs Harvey's House, a replica of Harvey S. Firestone's childhood home, which serves as the backdrop for the Concerts in the Courtyard summer music series and free Outdoor Movie Nights. The courtyard sits around the Clock Tower and fountain, which is where most of the community events land.
The dining anchors have not moved. Sabi's Restaurant at 85 Town Center Ave. still runs its New American menu, a relatively small menu with lots of personality, with culinary embellishments that are intriguing and a confident, polished presentation. Homestead Kitchen & Cocktails at 163 Town Center Ave. is the farm-to-table option with brunch. Mexico City Bar & Grill at 121 Town Center Ave. covers the Tex-Mex slot. Riser Tavern on the Links, over at 105½ St. Andrews Drive, runs 20 regional and national beers on tap for a more casual golf-course-adjacent stop.
For city context on why the pace of programming keeps stacking, Columbiana city manager Lance Willard framed it this way in the local business press:
"It's just exciting to be in our area, where there's a lot happening, a lot of development, a lot of residential things happening, a lot of new families, a lot of new businesses. It's an exciting time and we're just happy and fortunate to be a part of it."
That's the operator's read. From a resident's perspective, the practical result is a calendar that no longer has quiet weekends in it between Memorial Day and the Street Fair.
The County Fair Bookend
Before the Street Fair takes over Main, the Columbiana County Fair in Lisbon runs first. Save the dates: August 3 through August 9, 2026. It is 15 minutes up SR-164, and the parking logistics are their own thing. Public parking lots are located on the North side of Saltwell Road and accessed from SR-45, with a free shuttle wagon service that picks you up in the parking lot and delivers you to your choice of gates. Between the two fairs, you have roughly five weeks of overlapping animal barns, midway rides, and demolition derbies within a 20-minute drive. If you have kids on summer break, this is the practical window to plan around.
Building a Saturday Without Leaving 44408
Here is how the two anchors actually fit together in a single day, using confirmed 2026 dates.
On a Market on Main Saturday, September 19:
- Start at Magnolia & Co. or Columbiana Vintage before 10:00 AM. The market technically opens at 10, but the block traffic thickens fast, and parking near The Circle, using 8 S. Main Street as the GPS pin, tightens after 10:30.
- Walk the stalls until noon. Food trucks and the Vintage Saloon mobile tap bar handle lunch on-street.
- Cut over to Firestone Farms for a mid-afternoon reset. Sabi's for a proper sit-down, or Sespe Burger at Red Brick Commons for a faster turnaround.
- Check the TownCenter events calendar for a late-afternoon Concert in the Courtyard slot. The June and July shows ran 6:30 to 9:00 or 10:00 PM at Harvey's House, and the September lineup follows the same pattern when scheduled.
- Loop back to Main Street for dinner and evening hours at whichever restaurants are open. R'Pizza Place at 104 S. Main and Paul's Italian Grille at 36 S. Main are the anchor sit-downs on the downtown side.
On Street Fair weekend, September 10 through 12:
The choice inverts. The Street Fair carries the evening, so plan Firestone Farms for lunch or the mid-day, then walk into downtown around 5:00 PM Thursday for the parade line-up at Firestone Park. Friday and Saturday nights the midway runs late, and the Main Street storefronts stay open on adjusted hours.
What This Actually Means for the Neighborhood
The reason to pay attention to any of this is that it changes the answer to the question new neighbors keep asking longtime residents: what do you actually do here on weekends. A year ago the honest answer was Firestone Farms for dinner and Youngstown or Boardman for anything else. That answer is dated. The Port Authority's recent downtown study identified 29 new businesses, 590 properties being tracked, 23 properties actively marketed and 131 street-level opportunities for transformation in vacant spaces across the county's seven walkable downtowns, and Columbiana is one of the ones actively adding tenants rather than losing them. DeMaiolo, who is building Red Brick Commons, described Columbiana on the business-press record as one of the few communities experiencing population growth over the last couple of years in our area.
For a resident, that translates to more storefronts open past 6:00 PM within walking distance of each other. For a homeowner watching the neighborhood, it means the two anchors that used to compete are now reinforcing each other, and the sidewalks between them are filling in rather than thinning out.
That is worth knowing before the Street Fair barricades go up.
If you own a home in Columbiana and want to know how the downtown and Firestone Farms momentum is showing up in buyer demand on your specific street, The Duvall Group tracks this market block by block. Request Your Free Home Valuation and we will pull the comps and the context together in one place.