The Square Filled In While Forsyth Was Watching The Buc-ee's Groundbreaking

What actually changed about a Saturday afternoon on the Forsyth square this year? Not the thing everyone in Monroe County has been talking about since April.

That would be the Buc-ee's. Ground broke on a 74,000-square-foot travel center off Rumble Road back in April, and the project has been the loudest topic at the courthouse and in line at the grocery store ever since. It is a legitimate story. It is also, for anyone planning an actual weekend right now, close to irrelevant. The travel center will not sell a single Beaver Nugget until sometime in 2027. Meanwhile, three restaurants, a courthouse-square diner with a new national fan base, and a state park doing something it has never done before have already reshaped what there is to do here this fall. The Buc-ee's is the headline. It is not the story.

The Meeting Everyone Remembers

Start with the part people actually argued about. About 100 residents packed the Monroe County Commission meeting in December 2025 when officials voted on whether to let a Texas-based gas station chain build its fourth Georgia location here, following stores in Adairsville, Warner Robins, and Brunswick. The vote went through. Company filings project the location will generate around $30 million a year once it opens, and county officials have pointed to more than 200 promised jobs, many with above-minimum pay and benefits, as the argument that carried the room.

Here is the part that gets skipped in most of the coverage. Monroe County's combined sales tax rate is 8 percent, and the state keeps roughly half of whatever gets collected. What is left gets divided among the county general fund, the Monroe County Board of Education, and the cities of Forsyth and Culloden. Based on the numbers filed ahead of the vote, the county general fund's share works out to an estimated $900,000. That is real money for a county this size, but it is a fraction of the $30 million headline figure, and it lands in four different accounts before anyone spends a dollar of it on anything. Worth remembering the next time someone frames the project as a windfall rather than a slow trickle split four ways.

None of that changes anything about this October. The site is still dirt and equipment. The soonest realistic opening, based on the 14-to-16-month construction window the company gave at the groundbreaking, lands sometime in 2027.

What's Already Open While You Wait

The square did not wait around for the highway news to resolve itself. Bonzu Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi opened at 22 W Main Street in November 2024, and it is now well into its second full year on the courthouse square. Owner Stephen Liu, who also runs a Bonzu location in McDonough, built out a 110-seat dining room with a hibachi bar in a storefront locals had watched sit empty for months before the ribbon cutting. It is no longer the new place in town. It is just one of the places in town, which is its own kind of milestone for a small square.

It has company. A short walk around the courthouse turns up:

• Fox City Brewing Company on N Kimball Street
• Queen Bee Coffee Company
• Grits Cafe on W Johnston Street
• Jonah's on Johnston, a few doors down

None of these are brand new. What is new is that they now add up to something. A square that used to send people to Macon or up I-75 for a night out can currently keep them local for dinner, a beer, and a coffee the next morning, all within a few blocks of each other.

The Diner That Didn't Need Discovering

Down the road from the square, in Juliette, the Whistle Stop Cafe did not open a new location or add a menu item this year. It got named to Southern Living's Top 15 list of roadside restaurants worth the stop, announced in June. Only one other Georgia restaurant made that list, in Atlanta. A diner in a town most GPS apps still struggle to spell correctly beat out every other small Georgia town for a national food magazine's attention.

Locals had known that for years. The café became a fixture after the 1991 filming of Fried Green Tomatoes there, and owner Liz Bryant has run daily operations since the early 2000s, serving the same fried green tomatoes and meat-and-three plates the movie made famous. Southern Living just caught up.

The cafe still keeps its own schedule, open Thursday through Monday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed Tuesday and Wednesday, no reservations. That has not changed and probably will not.

The Fall Calendar Got Crowded

Between mid-September and mid-November, Monroe County has more going on than the square alone can hold.

Six weeks, seven distinct events, and two of them landing on the same October Saturday at the same state park. That is not filler content padding out a slow season. That is a county calendar with more happening than it has room for.

The Park Doing Something New

The High Falls Folk Fest deserves its own mention, because 2026 marks the first time it is actually happening inside High Falls State Park itself. Previous years put it at the High Falls Legion Hall. The festival takes its name from the Allman Brothers song inspired by the same waterfall, and moving it onto park grounds puts music, art vendors, and food trucks within sight of the thing the song was written about.

The waterfall earns the attention. It is the tallest cascading waterfall south of Atlanta, dropping over the Towaliga River through what used to be a genuinely busy industrial town. In the early 1800s, High Falls had a grist mill, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a shoe factory, and a hotel. Later, a hydroelectric plant here supplied power to Forsyth, Jackson, Griffin, and Macon, four towns running on the same water now feeding a state park lake stocked with hybrid and white bass. The town's fortunes ended in the 1880s when a major railroad line bypassed it, and the park itself was established roughly 60 years ago on what was left. The park has also started running a free, ongoing mushroom-art scavenger hunt called Game of Shrooms across its grounds and Monroe County, a small sign that the people managing this place are thinking about it differently than they used to.

Pair the folk fest with the Plein Air Middle Georgia event happening the same day, now in its third year, and you get painters working the same trails and waterfall views that industrial-era mill workers would have walked past on their way to a shift.

What This Actually Adds Up To

The Buc-ee's will eventually matter here. More jobs, more traffic off I-75, more tax revenue split four ways once the doors open sometime in 2027. But the changes that already happened this year did not need a groundbreaking ceremony or a construction crew. A restaurant on the square hit its two-year mark. A diner in Juliette got a national nod for something it has done since 1991. A state park moved its own festival onto its own grounds for the first time. None of that made the front page the way the gas station did. All of it is closer to what actually fills a Saturday in Forsyth this fall.

Jacque Applegate has spent more than two decades working across Middle Georgia, including Monroe County, from a base down I-75 in Warner Robins. She keeps closer track of what's changing in towns like Forsyth than most people would expect from someone who lives somewhere else. When a move around the region does land on your calendar, whether that's toward Forsyth or away from it, Jacque Applegate is worth the call.