A festival for North America’s largest native fruit, in the village that shares its name — tastings, food trucks, tram tours out to the groves, growers’ talks and live music.
The pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to North America — custard-textured, somewhere between banana, mango, and pineapple, and so perishable it has never made it to a supermarket shelf. It ripens in northern Illinois for only a few weeks each September. The village of Paw Paw grew up in a grove of these trees: Chief Shabbona’s Potawatomi knew the spot, and from 1829 the Chicago–Galena stagecoaches stopped here on the first east–west route across northern Illinois.
One Saturday a year, the Paw Paw Lions Club turns Veterans Park into the surest place in the region to actually taste one — about 5,000 people from twenty states made the trip last year.
What to Expect
- Fresh pawpaw tastings, and fruit to take home — bring a cooler; it’s softer and riper than it looks
- Pawpaw seedlings and trees for sale from the growers themselves
- Tram tours out to the local pawpaw plantings
- Growers’ talks on raising America’s largest native fruit
- Pawpaw ice cream and cheesecake, food vendors, and a pawpaw Kölsch in the beer garden (21+)
- Live music and kids’ activities all day
Good to Know
Admission is free, rain or shine. The festival fills Paw Paw Veterans Park at 314 Chapman Street, just off I-39 in eastern Lee County — about 20 minutes from Rochelle’s hotels, and within 40 minutes of Reagan’s Dixon, the Lincoln Highway headquarters in Franklin Grove, and the bison at Nachusa Grasslands. Check pawpawfest.org for the day’s schedule as it’s announced.
