ACD Festival Week in Auburn: A Local's Guide to the 70th Year

For fifty-one weeks a year, Auburn is a driving town. Then Labor Day weekend arrives, downtown barricades go up, and the courthouse square becomes something else entirely: a walking city stitched together by chrome bumpers and folding chairs.

If you already live here, the week reads differently than it does for the visitors who fly in for it. You know which cross streets stay open. You know that the best coffee line is not the one closest to the parade route. You have opinions about which auction tent has the better hot dog. This year the festival turns seventy, and the version of it worth planning around is not the one on the tourist maps.

The week when Auburn stops being a driving town

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival returns to Downtown Auburn from Wednesday, September 3, 2026, through Sunday, September 6, 2026, bringing together Auburns, Cords, Duesenbergs, and an impressive collection of owner-driven classics for a four-day run. In 2026, we will celebrate the 70th annual Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival.

The practical reality for residents is simpler than the program suggests. Downtown Auburn is the place to be for the popular Friday ACD Festival Cruise-In, and the downtown streets are closed for this unique gathering of worldwide visitors. If your errand list includes anything within a few blocks of the courthouse between Thursday afternoon and Sunday morning, plan to walk in from the edges rather than fight the interior for a parking spot.

A resident's timing map

The published schedule is dense. Here is the shape of the week reduced to the moments locals actually care about:

Two of those blocks are worth extra planning. This year's Parade of Classics will feature the "Year of the Century Car," with the Baron Brigade Marching Band from DeKalb High School joining parade VIPs, including parade Grand Marshal Sarah Fisher, former IndyCar driver. The DeKalb connection is why you will see families on the parade route who otherwise skip car events. If you have a kid in the band program, you already know.

The Saturday split most visitors miss

Saturday is really two festivals stacked on top of each other, and the crossover window between them is the best-kept secret of the week.

The daylight half belongs to pre-war metal. The 9th Street Experience remains the place to find the festival's strongest Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg presence, with cars positioned between Jackson and Main, and for owners who value originality, trim correctness, and period presentation, this is the area that will matter most. Even if you have walked past those cars every September of your adult life, this is the block that rewards a slow second look. Ask an owner about the coachwork. They came here to talk.

The evening flips the script entirely. The festival welcomes SweetCars and the Fort Wayne Driving Club back to downtown Auburn for the 2026 edition of Fast and Fabulous, with 100+ modern exotic and sports cars filling the "SweetStreets" around the courthouse square starting at 5PM and on display from 5:30PM to 7:30PM. The festival text specifically names Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, McLaren, Porsche, Corvette, Camaro, and Mustang among the brands likely to appear.

The window between the two, roughly 3:30 to 5:00 on Saturday, is when downtown briefly empties out. Parade watchers head home. Exotic-car spectators have not yet arrived. If you want to actually eat a meal at a table without waiting, that is your ninety-minute window.

Eating and drinking without the wait

The food answer changes by the hour. During peak parade and cruise-in times, expect lines at every sit-down spot within four blocks of the square. The workarounds locals use:

• Cruise-In Cuisine on 7th Street. Between Jackson St. and Main St., the Cruise-In Cuisine lineup features Coterie Pizza, Kona Ice, Travelin' Toms Coffee, Waterloo Lions Club Burgers & Dogs, Hoosier Mama, and Who Cut the Cheese? Walk-up windows move faster than any host stand this week.
• The FAK Logistics beer garden. Grab a cold one that comes with an FAK Logistics collector koozie, with Mad Anthony's award-winning "Auburn Brew" available, in addition to the 2026 ACD Festival wine bottled by Country Heritage Winery and Vineyard. The Country Heritage bottle only exists during festival week. If you want one for the shelf, buy early in the week.
• Anywhere north of 15th Street. The barricades stop well before the north end of town. Restaurants outside the closure ring still get busy but rarely turn people away.

If you have out-of-town family staying with you, this is the guidance that keeps the visit from turning into a two-hour dinner search.

The auction weekend most residents never attend

Locals tend to treat the auction as a tourist event. It is worth reconsidering, at least once. The Kruse Auctions boutique auction runs from 9 AM to 6 PM at 5634 Opportunity Blvd., with the auction beginning at 11 AM and the main event on Sept. 5 beginning around 5 PM, featuring a curated offering of 300+ Collector Cars and 150 Pieces of Memorabilia. Admission gets you inside the tent whether or not you plan to bid. Sitting through an hour of a live collector-car auction is a genuinely different way to spend a Saturday afternoon in Auburn, and the crowd is smaller than the courthouse square.

The same is true of the museums the festival supports. The funding efforts of the festival help support the automotive-related Museums of Auburn, including the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, National Auto and Truck Museum US (NATMUS), Early Ford V-8 Foundation Museum, and the International Monster Truck Hall of Fame and Museum. Locals often mean to visit and rarely do. Festival week is when the exhibits are dressed up and the docents are at their sharpest.

What actually changed downtown this year

Two things are new enough that you may not have registered them yet on your regular downtown walks.

The larger art installation in front of the ACDA Museum was completed by local artist Amy Buchs with help from a group from the Hearten House, and features the Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg car emblems. The emblems are set into the crosswalk itself. Look down, not up.

A sixth crosswalk was set to be completed in the spring of 2026 by the DeKalb Visitor's Bureau, made possible through a grant through Patronicity secured by Auburn Main Street. That crosswalk expansion is the reason downtown feels slightly more pedestrian-first this festival week than last. If you have not walked the full square since spring, you will notice.

After Sunday: the cruise-ins that keep the season going

The 70th festival is the loudest week of the Auburn calendar, but the car culture does not pack up on Monday. Third Thursday cruise-ins run 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM on May 21, June 18, July 16, Aug. 20 and Sept. 17 for 2026 in Downtown Auburn. The September 17 date is the one most residents forget about. It is quieter, cheaper, and the cars that show up are often the ones that could not squeeze into the main festival weekend. If you want the atmosphere without the crowd, put it on the calendar now.

The pattern that emerges when you stack all of this together is that Auburn's automotive identity is not a once-a-year performance. It is a slow-burn civic asset that the festival amplifies for four days and then hands back to the people who live with it every day. The residents who get the most out of the 70th year are the ones who treat the week as their week, not the tourists' week they happen to be sharing.

Whether you have lived in Auburn for two years or twenty, having a real estate team that knows this town at the block level matters when the time comes to move, upsize, or help family land here. When that day arrives, Scott Yoder and the team at First Response Realty are ready to talk. Contact Us.