Park at the Church Road Trailhead behind the Fairgrounds and the old habit was simple: walk the loop, get back to your car, drive home. The McDougald Trail, the Upper Fairgrounds Trail, and the Lower Fairgrounds Trail wind through about a mile of field and forest on the town's 35-acre Fairgrounds property, and for years that mile was the whole trip. If you wanted to walk the trails behind Maranacook Community School too, that meant getting back in the car, driving over to Millard Harrison Drive, and starting a second walk from a second trailhead.
That's no longer how it works, and most people walking the Fairgrounds this fall haven't noticed why their loop suddenly feels longer.
The Sidewalk Did the Quiet Work
The Fairgrounds property abuts the 300-acre Maranacook Community School property, which has its own trail network used for hiking, cross-country skiing, and outdoor class time. For a long stretch, those two systems sat next to each other on the map without a walkable connection between them. You could see the school's tree line from the Fairgrounds trails. You just couldn't walk to it without crossing back onto Route 17 and hoping for a shoulder wide enough to feel safe.
The town has since built a sidewalk along Route 17, also known as Main Street, and along Millard Harrison Drive, the access road into the school. That sidewalk ties into the Maranacook-Fairgrounds Link Trail, and it continues onto the school property itself. The practical result: a walker can now start at the Church Road Trailhead, finish the Fairgrounds loop, follow the sidewalk instead of turning back, and pick up the school's trail system without ever getting in a car.
Here's the shift in plain terms.
| Before the sidewalk | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Fairgrounds loop | One mile, self-contained | Same one mile, but no longer a dead end |
| Getting to school trails | Drive to a second trailhead on Millard Harrison Drive | Walk the connecting sidewalk directly from the Fairgrounds |
| Total trip | Two separate short walks | One extended walk across two properties |
| Surface underfoot | Crushed rock and hard-packed gravel on the trails themselves | Same trail surface, now bridged by a paved sidewalk |
None of the trails changed. No new forest got cut, no new mileage got built into the woods. The change is a strip of concrete along a road shoulder, and it turned two separate destinations into one continuous outing.
Walking It This Week
If you haven't done the extended version yet, here's roughly how it lays out from the Church Road side.
- Start at the Church Road Trailhead. It sits on the east side of Church Road, about 0.3 miles north of the Route 17 and Route 41 intersection at the blinking light downtown. There's a kiosk and parking area.
- Take the loop through the Fairgrounds. The main section circles the playing fields, with the McDougald Trail and the Upper and Lower Fairgrounds Trails branching off through gently sloping field and forest.
- Pick up the Lower Fairgrounds Trail toward Route 17. This trail connects to the town's sidewalk along Main Street rather than dead-ending at the road.
- Follow the sidewalk onto Millard Harrison Drive. This is the access road to Maranacook Community School, and the sidewalk runs the length of it.
- Enter the school's trail system near the Superintendent's Office. That's the Maranacook Trailhead, where a second kiosk marks the entrance. Parking is available there too, if you'd rather start from this end.
- Loop back the way you came, or treat it as a one-way walk with a car staged at either end.
The whole thing is walkable in an afternoon, and none of it requires technical footwear. The surfaces are crushed rock, hard-packed dirt, or gravel, and the terrain is gentle the whole way. It's a genuinely different trip than the standalone Fairgrounds loop, not because the woods changed but because you're no longer required to stop where the fence line used to feel like the end.
The Fairgrounds Loop Isn't the Only Network in Town
Readfield's trail committee maintains more than just this one connected system. The Torsey/Echo Trails, the Fogg Trail, and the Esker Trail are all town-owned and looked after by the Readfield Trails Committee, and the Kennebec Land Trust has developed its own network separately, including trails in the Readfield Town Forest, the Tyler Trails, the Rosmarin-Saunders Family Forest, and Gannett Woods.
None of those systems connect to the Fairgrounds loop the way the school trails now do. They're worth knowing about on their own terms, especially if you want a shorter walk closer to home or a change of scenery once the Fairgrounds loop starts to feel familiar. But the Fairgrounds-to-school connection is the one that changed this year, and it's the one most residents drive past without realizing it now goes somewhere new.
Where the Walk Ends
If your loop brings you back out near Main Street with an hour of daylight left, the Weathervane Restaurant & Lounge at 1030 Main St. is the obvious stop. It's been a Readfield fixture for more than four decades, and the current owners bought it in December 2021 in a decision the family describes as rooted in the restaurant's own history: the current owner grew up around the place, and her husband's first job there was washing dishes back in 1985. Their head chef has been with the family for twelve years. It's open Wednesday through Friday from 4 to 9 p.m. and Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., which lines up well with a late-afternoon finish to the loop.
It's a small detail, but it matters for how the walk actually functions in daily life. A connected trail system is only as useful as what's at the end of it, and Readfield's version ends at a restaurant that's been serving the same Main Street for longer than most of the trail signage has existed.
The Point Isn't the Sidewalk
A new sidewalk is not, on its own, an exciting piece of news. But what it did here is worth noticing if you live in Readfield and have treated the Fairgrounds loop as a fixed, familiar mile for years. The town didn't add trail mileage. It removed the one obstacle that kept two separate trail systems from functioning as one, and that's a different kind of improvement than the ones that usually get talked about at town meetings. You don't need a car, a second trip, or a reason to drive across town to walk both properties in one outing anymore. You just need to keep going where you used to turn around.
If you're already out there this week, that's the whole point. And if you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts in how a town works, because you're thinking about property here or already own a piece of it, the team at Hoang Realty knows Readfield at this level of detail and is glad to talk through what it means for you. Start Your Search whenever you're ready.
