Dellwood does not have a downtown. It never really has. The city council meets a few miles away in Willernie because Dellwood has no city hall of its own, and when the 1993 incorporation paperwork went through, it made Dellwood the last piece of old Lincoln Township to become its own city. What the town has instead of storefronts is golf courses, an apple orchard, and roughly 1,200 residents spread across 2.81 square miles of woods and shoreline. If you want a sandwich or a coffee, you drive two minutes into White Bear Lake. If you want to understand how Dellwood actually spends a week, you have to look at the handful of specific places just outside its borders that the town has always leaned on instead of building its own.
Right now, in the second week of August, those places are between seasons. Marketfest, the Thursday-night festival that has run in downtown White Bear Lake every summer for 36 years, wrapped its last week of the 2026 run at the end of July. Pine Tree Apple Orchard, the 300-acre, family-run orchard that has been picking fruit here since 1904, closed its doors after strawberry season ended on June 28 and will not reopen its Sales Room until mid-August. That leaves a real gap on the calendar, not a vague seasonal fade but a specific, dated stretch where the two anchors most people associate with a Dellwood summer are both offline. Locals do not wait it out. They shift to the places that were never on the summer festival calendar in the first place.
A borrowed calendar, not an empty one
The reason this gap matters is that Dellwood's social life has never really belonged to Dellwood. It belongs to a small ring of institutions sited just over the line, and knowing which one is open on which week is close to a local skill. The White Bear Lake Farmers' Market is the one constant running through this gap. It sets up on Clark Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets every Friday from 8 a.m. to noon, starting the last Friday in June and continuing through the last Friday in October, a run that has held since the 1970s. With more than 50 vendors selling everything from wild rice to fresh salmon, it is the one weekly fixture that does not care whether Marketfest is running or the orchard is picking.
That is not an accident. Marketfest and the orchard are seasonal by design. The market is a tradition built to outlast both.
The vineyard on the old Hill land
For the two weeks when Marketfest has ended and the orchard has not reopened, the place that absorbs the overflow is 7 Vines Vineyard, sitting on a 188-acre estate in Dellwood once owned by railroad baron James J. Hill. Ten of those acres are planted in vines, and the winery keeps a fireside tasting room open to the public Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday. There is a small irony in the fact that the same Hill name behind the vineyard's land also shows up in the founding roster of the White Bear Yacht Club a few miles down the shore. When the club formed in the fall of 1889, its charter membership pulled from a tight circle of St. Paul families that included Ordway, Drake, Lightner, O'Brien, Weyerhaeuser, and Hill, the same families who built the architect-designed summer cottages that gave Dellwood its start as a retreat after the Stillwater and St. Paul Railroad reached the area in 1870.
That history is not just trivia. It explains why Dellwood's calendar has always run through a small number of large, privately held properties rather than a strip of independent shops. The orchard, the vineyard, and the yacht club are not incidental amenities near a town. In a meaningful sense, they are the town's infrastructure, doing the job that a commercial district would do somewhere else.
The quiet revival on the water
The yacht club itself is worth a second look during this stretch, because its most interesting recent chapter has nothing to do with real estate or dining and everything to do with a near-extinction. The A-class scow, the signature racing boat on White Bear Lake, was nearly wiped out after a 1932 storm destroyed most of the fleet, and the expense of rebuilding during the Depression meant the boats mostly disappeared for decades. The turn came in 2000, when Dellwood resident Fletcher Driscoll, tired of trying to fit his family of 18 onto a 28-foot E-boat, decided to restore an older A-boat instead. That single restoration sparked new interest among lake area residents and helped bring the class back into regular competition. It is a small story, but it says something true about how things get preserved here. Not through institutions acting alone, but through one resident deciding a piece of the town's identity was worth the trouble.
Where the gap actually gets filled
None of this means the two weeks are quiet in the sense of empty. They are quiet in the sense that the obvious answers are off the table, which pushes people toward the smaller, more specific spots that keep running year round. Downtown White Bear Lake, two minutes from Dellwood by car, carries the load. Acqua serves upscale Italian with lake views for anyone who wants a sit-down dinner. Cabin 61 is the sports bar version of the same idea, known for a campfire burger loaded with smoked gouda and lingonberry jam. Young's covers Korean food and a beer list. Bella Ciao Pasta and Bar Ristorante and MC's Taco and Tequila round out the rotation for anyone who wants pasta one night and firecracker shrimp the next. Margaux's Table and Farm Store leans into a smaller, home-cooked American menu, and Eat @ Banning & 5th is the cafe people default to for breakfast before a Friday market run.
Here is the shape of the gap, in the dates that matter this year:
| Anchor | 2026 status as of August 9 |
|---|---|
| Marketfest (Thursdays, downtown White Bear Lake) | Ended for the season, ran mid-June through end of July |
| White Bear Lake Farmers' Market (Fridays, Clark Ave) | Running weekly through the last Friday in October |
| Pine Tree Apple Orchard Sales Room | Closed since June 28, reopening mid-August |
| 7 Vines Vineyard | Open Wed through Sat 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sun 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
The gap closes itself within days. Once the orchard's Sales Room reopens, the town's rhythm shifts again toward apples, cider, and the corn maze that runs through the fall. But the two-week window right now is a useful reminder that Dellwood's calendar was never a smooth curve from one season to the next. It has always been a handoff between a small number of specific, named places, and the town's lack of a commercial center of its own is exactly what makes each handoff visible if you know where to look.
There is a version of this story that gets told as F. Scott Fitzgerald once spending time at a cottage here while working on parts of The Beautiful and the Damned, the exact address still debated by local historians. Whether or not that particular cottage still stands, the underlying pattern holds. Dellwood has never generated its own institutions so much as it has hosted a small, durable set of them, from a vineyard on old railroad money to a yacht club with a 137-year sailing tradition to an orchard that has been run by the same family since 1904. Knowing when each one is open is not a minor detail. It is close to the whole story of how the town works.
If you are already living this rhythm and thinking about what your place near Dellwood or White Bear Lake is actually worth in the current market, the team at White Bear Lake Realty can walk you through a free home valuation and talk through what is happening in this specific stretch of the market, no obligation attached.
