The 1895 House at Second and Cherry Carries Downtown Rogers From Halloween to New Year's

Between October 23 and January 2, downtown Rogers has a dozen or so dated events. Most of them start, end or get organized at one address. The Rogers Historical Museum sits at 313 and 322 South Second Street, on the corner of Second and Cherry. It runs the Ghost Walks and the Halloween candy route, hosts a Victorian greenery workshop presented by the Benton County Master Gardeners, and offers a holiday house tour tied to America's 250th anniversary, and its 26th annual Holiday Open House.

The museum is a department of the City of Rogers and has operated since 1975. It's open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and general admission is free. The Hawkins House, a middle-class Victorian brick home built on that corner in 1895, anchors the holiday half of the calendar.

Ghost Walks run 16 people at a time, so the math matters

The museum's season starts with a small event. The museum and Arkansas Public Theatre run Ghost Walks on October 23, 24, 28, 29 and 30. On each tour, costumed interpreters tell true accounts of "murder, mischief, and mayhem" drawn from obituaries printed in local newspapers between the 1870s and 1920s. The route covers the museum grounds and historic Downtown Rogers.

Here are the details that decide whether you get a spot:

1. Tickets are $15 per person, and registration is required.
2. Each tour is limited to 16 participants.
3. The first tour leaves the museum at 7 p.m., and another leaves every 15 minutes until the last one at 8:15 p.m.
4. Each tour runs 45 minutes and covers about a quarter mile at a slow pace.
5. The museum recommends the tour for ages 16 and up.

That works out to six departures a night and 96 spots per evening. Across all five evenings, that's 480 tickets for the whole run. The schedule includes Friday and Saturday, October 23 and 24, then Wednesday through Friday, October 28 to 30. Groups who want a weekend evening are competing for the 192 spots on the first two nights. Registration goes through the museum's Eventbrite listing, which doesn't show how many seats remain on each date.

The dates also vary by source. The museum's own pages list the five October evenings above. The City of Rogers calendar entry shows a range of October 30 through November 1. The museum is the organizer, so its list is the one to plan around. The museum's number is 479-621-1154 if you want to confirm before you buy.

Halloween afternoon moves one block over to Railyard Park

The museum's next event takes its booth outside. The Goblin Candy Crawl runs on Saturday, October 31, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Families pick up a trick-or-treat bag and a map at the Rogers Historical Museum booth in Railyard Park, then follow the route through downtown.

The map is built from participating downtown businesses, which sign up through a registration page the museum hosts. The museum organizes the event, and the storefronts on the map carry it. It ends at 5:30, early enough that families can still trick-or-treat at home after dark.

Railyard Park also hosts Rotary events on either side of the museum's calendar. A week before the first Ghost Walk, Downtown Rogers Oktoberfest NWA fills Butterfield Stage and Railyard Park on Saturday, October 17, with regional breweries, wine, food and live music. The same Rotary organizers run December's parade.

November turns the same house toward Christmas

On Saturday, November 14, the Hawkins House changes over from Halloween to the holidays. Two things happen that day.

At 11:30 a.m., the Benton County Master Gardeners present "Victorian Holiday Traditions: Gardens, Greens & Timeless Celebrations" in the museum's Key Wing Education Center. The program covers how Victorian families decorated with evergreen boughs, holly, ivy, ribbons and candles. Everyone makes a traditional Victorian kissing ball to take home. The program is free, runs until 1 p.m., and doesn't require registration.

The same day, the museum opens "A Patriotic Christmas," a themed guided tour of the Hawkins House that runs through January 2, 2027. The museum built it as its year-end program for America's 250th anniversary. It uses objects from the museum collection to show how Americans worked patriotic tributes into Christmas displays, especially in wartime, from the Civil War through World War I.

The house suits that theme. According to the Rogers-Lowell Chamber's October 2 announcement, three generations of the Hawkins family lived there over 79 years. The City of Rogers bought it in 1980, and it became home to the museum in 1982. A 1995 restoration returned it to its original architectural design, and it's furnished with circa-1900 pieces from the collection. The holiday displays sit in rooms furnished the way a middle-class Rogers household would have looked around 1900.

Tours run on request Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. You can ask at the Hailey Building visitor information desk or at the Key Wing entrance. That makes this the one event of the season with no fixed date. It's open for seven weeks, so you can fit it into a weekday lunch or a slow Saturday morning.

The grounds have been quieter than usual this fall. The museum canceled its monthly Hawkins House Garden Tour for September and October 2026 because of grounds construction. The museum hasn't published details about the work, so it's worth calling ahead if you're planning a visit around the outdoor spaces.

The first two weekends of December run on the bricks

In December, the season moves from the museum corner onto the main streets, then back again.

Friday, December 4. The Rogers Christmas Parade, organized by the Rotary Clubs of Rogers and sponsored by F1rstNB, keeps its traditional first-Friday-in-December slot. This year's theme is "Christmas in Toyland." Festivities begin at 5 p.m., and the parade steps off at 6:30. Entries line up along 5th Street from 5th and Poplar. The route runs through the heart of downtown along 1st Street and Walnut Street, then heads back south on 7th Street. On 1st Street, parking on both sides is cleared starting at 6 a.m. that day, according to the parade organizers. If you usually park on 1st Street for a weekday errand, plan around that morning closure.

Saturday, December 5. The next afternoon, Sips on the Bricks runs from 4 to 8 p.m. downtown, with a holiday sip contest, a costume contest and shopping.

Saturday, December 12. The season comes back to Second and Cherry for the museum's 26th annual Holiday Open House, which is free and runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Families can tour the Hawkins House decorated for "A Patriotic Christmas," make crafts, write and mail a letter to Santa, and have cookies and hot cocoa. Santa reads Clement Moore's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" at 11 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. If you'd rather tour the house on your own schedule, the weekday on-request tours run through January 2. The Open House is the version with a crowd.

Ozark Charcuterie makes an easy stop between events. The shop opened this summer in the First Street Flats building at 401 N. First St., with a retail counter and a bar. KNWA reported that the Fayetteville company held its downtown Rogers grand opening on July 9. This is its first holiday season on the street the parade comes down.

The whole season, by date

Five of the eight entries are museum programs, and the other three take place downtown. The Hawkins House holds the Patriotic Christmas tour for seven weeks and is the main stop at the December 12 Open House.

The Hawkins House got a 1995 restoration back to its original design, and it still gets decorated for the season more than a century after it was built. If you own an older home in downtown Rogers and want to know what thoughtful updates or holiday-season staging could do for it, Marla Roberds can walk through it with you and give you a free home valuation, or a plan for staging and remodel options before you list.