Walk the new eastern loop at Stoneleigh this month and you'll cross a property line that didn't exist a year ago. As of this past June, the free public garden on East County Line Road is no longer the 42 acres the Haas family donated back in 2016. It's 52, after Natural Lands finished reuniting the estate with a parcel that had been split off and sold in the 1920s and 30s. For a piece of land that's been quietly changing hands and use since 1877, when a Pennsylvania Railroad executive named Edmund Smith first bought 65 acres here and built a house, that's not a small correction. It's the estate getting most of itself back.
Most people who live near Lancaster Avenue already know Stoneleigh as the place with the free parking lot and the path that takes about an hour if you're not in a hurry. What fewer people have clocked is that the garden's expansion lands in the same eight-week window as two of the biggest single-weekend crowds Villanova sees all year, both of which route directly through the same half-mile of road Stoneleigh sits off of. That overlap, not any one event on its own, is the thing worth planning around this fall.
How 42 Acres Became 52
Stoneleigh's short public history is really a story about how close it came to not being public at all. When John and Chara Haas's children donated the family estate to Natural Lands in April 2016, the nonprofit spent two years preparing it for visitors. Just before the garden's scheduled opening in May 2018, the Lower Merion School District announced plans to take the property by eminent domain and build a middle school and sports complex on it instead. Natural Lands and the surrounding community pushed back hard enough, fast enough, that the district backed off and Stoneleigh opened as planned.
That fight is worth knowing because it explains why this year's expansion matters more than a routine acreage update would. The ten acres added this summer had been carved off the original Stoneleigh property back in the 1920s and 30s, long before anyone was thinking about conservation easements or public gardens. Getting that land back under one ownership, on the same grounds a school district once tried to claim outright, is Natural Lands closing a loop that's been open for roughly a century.
Practically, that means more of the estate is now walkable on the same porous paved paths and level asphalt roads that make the garden usable for strollers and wheelchairs, not just hikers. The garden is open Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays, with no admission fee and a 63-car lot at the East County Line Road entrance. Dogs aren't permitted inside the gates, service animals excepted, which is worth knowing before you plan a walk there instead of somewhere else.
The programming calendar has kept pace with the new ground. Fall brings volunteer garden days, guided walks built around specific plants rather than generic tours, and a run of Saturdays where East Branch Brewing Company sets up on the grounds. A spring wine event sold out its home and garden tour outright this year, which says something about how much local demand has built around a property that was nearly a parking lot for a school gym seven years ago. A short list of what recurs each season:
- Seasonal guided walks tied to specific features, like the summer's flowering vines and moth-focused evening sessions
- East Branch Brewing Company pours on select Saturdays
- Small-group volunteer gardening mornings, open to ages 12 and up
- A ticketed home and garden tour each spring, which has sold out in recent years
None of that changes because the acreage grew, but it does mean there's simply more garden to walk before or after any of it.
Two Weekends That Already Know Your Address
If Stoneleigh's expansion is the quiet story, Villanova University's fall calendar is the loud one, and it lands twice in the next two months on either side of the garden's front door.
Homecoming Weekend runs October 23 through 25, organized by the Villanova University Alumni Association with tailgate tents and events centered on campus. It's a returning-alumni weekend, which means hotel rooms fill up on the Main Line corridor and Lancaster Avenue sees a heavier mix of out-of-town cars than a typical fall Saturday.
Three weeks later, the bigger crowd arrives. Special Olympics Pennsylvania's Fall Festival returns to Villanova's campus November 13 through 15 for its 38th year, run entirely by Villanova students and billed as the largest annual student-run Special Olympics event in the world. This year's event expects more than 1,700 athletes, coaches, and Unified Partners representing 43 county programs across the state, supported by more than 3,500 volunteers drawn from the student body and the surrounding community. Competition runs across bocce, flag football, distance running and walking, powerlifting, soccer, and volleyball, spread across campus fields and courts over the three days.
Two different institutions, two different reasons for the crowd, and the same two-mile stretch of Lancaster and Ithan Avenues absorbing both of them within a month of each other. If you've lived here through a few Homecomings, you already know to expect the traffic. What's newer is stacking that against a Fall Festival weekend that keeps growing and a garden expansion that's quietly pulling its own weekend foot traffic at the same time of year.
The Table Everyone Already Reserved
There's a reason so much of that Lancaster Avenue crowd ends up in the same place for dinner. The Refectory opened its doors on a Friday, September 20, inside The Commons at Lancaster and Ithan Avenues, which happens to be today's date seven years later. It's Villanova University's first full-service, on-campus restaurant, run by Zavino Hospitality Group, the team behind Zavino and Tredici, and it was built to serve the university community and the general public from the same dining room.
The menu runs steakhouse standards alongside a raw bar and a sushi list, which is a wider spread than most campus-adjacent spots attempt. Parking sits across the street in the I-1 garage on South Ithan Avenue, with the first hour free and modest hourly rates after that. On a Homecoming Saturday or a Fall Festival weekend, that garage and that dining room are the default answer to where a family lands after a day on campus, which is worth knowing if you're planning your own weekend around either event rather than through it.
The Fall That's Actually Three Falls
None of this is really three separate stories. It's one calendar with three fixtures that don't share an organizer but do share a street. Stoneleigh's new ten acres open the same weeks Homecoming fills the hotels and the Fall Festival fills the fields, and The Refectory sits at the intersection where all three end up anyway. If you've walked Stoneleigh a hundred times, this is the fall to see what the extra acreage actually adds. If you've never made it past the parking lot, the run from mid-October through mid-November is as good a stretch as the garden gets, before the crowds from campus start competing for the same stretch of road.
Living in Villanova long enough means you stop noticing how much of the town's rhythm runs through that half-mile. This year it's worth noticing again.
If you're curious how a fall like this one shapes what a Villanova property is worth to the next buyer walking through it, or if you're weighing a move in or out of this stretch of the Main Line, Gary Scheivert & Associates has spent decades reading exactly these kinds of local details. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
