There's a caution light on NC-740 about halfway between New London and Badin, and for most of the year it marks nothing more exciting than the turn into a Boy Scout camp. Troops file through for summer merit badges. Families drive past without a second look. That changed for three days over Labor Day weekend, when the same gate off Camp Barnhardt Road funneled thousands of cars, campers, and at least one custom monster truck named Sasquatch into a 1,000-acre reservation that has spent six decades quietly building the kind of infrastructure a Scout camp needs and, as it turns out, exactly the kind of infrastructure a regional festival needs too.
The event was the Uwharrie Bigfoot Festival, and if you live in or around New London you probably already noticed it, whether you meant to or not. What's easy to miss, if you only caught the traffic and the costumes, is that this wasn't a one-off curiosity that happened to land at your neighborhood camp. It's the second running of something that already grew a full second event inside itself in the space of a year, on land that was engineered for exactly this kind of load long before anyone thought to bring Bigfoot researchers to Stanly County.
The Camp Everyone Already Knows, Just Not This Version of It
Camp John J. Barnhardt has operated since 1966, when it hosted more than fifty Scout troops from the Central NC Council in its first season. It sits inside the William C. Cannon Scout Reservation, named in 1986 for a former council president, and the reservation grew to more than 1,000 acres after a 1994 land purchase added 154 more beside Harper-Hearne Lake. The property runs along Badin Lake with views of the Uwharrie Mountains, and over the decades it picked up the kind of amenities a working camp accumulates: a 350-seat air-conditioned dining hall, an outdoor stone-and-stained-glass chapel, a swimming pool, a climbing tower the camp's own materials describe as the highest in the area, an 18-hole disc golf course, and a pavilion built in 2014 on the old Commissary and Trading Post site. None of that was built with a festival in mind. All of it turned out to be exactly what a festival needs.
That's the part worth sitting with if you've ever driven past this camp and assumed it was just, well, a camp. It has a dining hall that can feed 350 people at once. It has open fields, a working waterfront, and road access built to move troop buses in and out all summer. When the Scouting season winds down after Labor Day, that same footprint sits idle, at least until someone figures out what else it's good for.
What Actually Happened This Labor Day
The 2026 Uwharrie Bigfoot Festival ran Friday, September 4 through Sunday, September 6, with hours from 2 to 8 p.m. on Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday. The bill included Bigfoot-themed live entertainment, guest cryptid researchers, a Bigfoot calling contest and a Bigfoot costume contest, a zip line tower, a kids zone, craft and merchandise vendors, and a rotating cast of food trucks, including one called The Angry Lobster that leaned into the joke of serving lobster rolls at a Bigfoot festival. There was also, memorably, a ride called the Sasquatch Monster Ride Truck, a one-of-a-kind Ford F250 that seats eight and tours the country hitting exactly this kind of event.
None of that is small-scale church-picnic energy. Festival organizers put last year's inaugural turnout at roughly 10,000 attendees, and going into this year's event they said publicly on the vendor registration page that they expected "at least the same or more attendees this year." A camp built to comfortably house a few hundred Scouts at a time was expected, by that estimate, to draw something closer to the population of a small city over the three days.
The Add-On That Tells You Where This Is Going
If you want the single clearest sign that this isn't a fading novelty, look at what got added this year that wasn't there for the first one. The 2026 festival introduced the first-ever NC Bronco Super Show, described by organizers as the largest Bronco gathering in the state, running inside the festival grounds on Saturday. Check-in ran from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., judging started at 10, and awards were announced around 3 p.m. The show also included guided trail rides through the Uwharrie National Forest organized with the NC Bronco Club, giving Bronco owners a reason to camp on-site for the whole weekend rather than just show up for an afternoon.
That's not a festival treading water. That's a festival that looked at its first-year numbers and decided to build a second, entirely separate draw on top of the original one, in the same twelve months. If the pattern holds, next Labor Day probably doesn't look like a smaller version of this one. It looks like this one plus whatever gets added next.
What It Actually Cost the Neighborhood, Logistically
For residents who live near the camp or drive NC-740 regularly, the practical footprint mattered more than the folklore. Organizers set up free overflow parking at the Town of Badin, with a complimentary shuttle running every hour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday only, ferrying guests between the overflow lot and the festival gate. Primitive camping was available on-site for attendees who wanted to stay the full weekend rather than commute in daily, though it required a separate reservation from the admission ticket and wasn't bundled in automatically.
If you're the kind of resident who plans your Labor Day weekend around what's happening at the end of your road, a few things are worth banking for next year:
- The heaviest traffic and parking pressure hit Saturday, when the shuttle ran and the Bronco Show added its own separate crowd on top of festival attendance.
- Sunday wound down earlier, ending at 4 p.m., which made it the lighter of the two full days if you wanted to see the grounds without the Saturday crush.
- Camp Barnhardt Road itself stays the single access point, so anyone living past the caution light on NC-740 during festival weekend should expect slower going both directions, not just near the gate.
None of that is disruptive in the way a highway project or a permanent land-use change would be. It's three days a year, and it comes with real upside for anyone who likes the idea of a costume contest and a lobster roll food truck showing up five minutes from home. But it's also not nothing, and residents who got caught off guard by the first year now have a full data point to plan around for the next one.
Why Barnhardt, Specifically, and Not Somewhere Else
It's tempting to treat the location as incidental, like the festival could have landed anywhere with open acreage near Badin Lake. It couldn't have, not easily. Camp Barnhardt's facilities were built over sixty years for the specific job of feeding, housing, and entertaining large groups on a fixed schedule, and that's a harder thing to replicate than open land alone. A dining hall that seats 350. A pavilion built in 2014 specifically to replace an aging commissary. A climbing tower and a zip line already standing and already insured for public use. An 18-hole disc golf course that gives a festival built-in daytime activity without adding a single structure. The camp's own materials note its facilities were recently rated first in a five-state area, and whatever that ranking is worth, the underlying claim tracks with what an event organizers expected to draw at least 10,000 people over the weekend would require.
That's the piece that changes how you should think about this camp going forward. It was never just a Scout property sitting quietly beside Badin Lake waiting to be noticed. It was, without anyone planning it this way, building exactly the kind of capacity that off-season festival organizers go looking for, and now that someone has found it and it worked, there's no obvious reason the arrangement stops after two years.
The Point
The Uwharrie Bigfoot Festival isn't a strange one-time thing that happened to land in New London's backyard. It's the second iteration of an event that already added a full second show inside itself within a single year, hosted on a piece of land that spent six decades accidentally preparing for exactly this kind of weekend. If you live nearby, the smart move isn't to be surprised by it again next Labor Day. It's to plan the Saturday drive around the shuttle schedule, maybe pack a folding chair, and go see what the fuss with the lobster rolls and the monster truck named Sasquatch was actually about.
That's the kind of thing that makes New London worth paying attention to even when nobody's buying or selling anything. We live here too, and we like watching this town surprise itself. If you ever want to talk about what else is changing around Badin Lake, from either side of a closing table or just over coffee, Patty Edwards Realty is easy to find and always happy to talk. Schedule a Free Consultation whenever the timing's right for you.
