"We cocooned the original Star Barn with new wood," David Abel told LancasterOnline a few years back, describing how his crew rebuilt the landmark barn that now anchors his 280-acre property in West Donegal Township. "It's a complete second building." Nearly ninety percent of the original 1877 structure got reused, but it's wrapped inside an entirely new frame with steel beams, climate control, and modern wiring hidden where nobody can see them. If you've been out to Stone Gables Estate off Hollinger Lane and assumed you'd seen the finished product, that quote is a good place to start reconsidering. Almost nothing on this property is quite what it looks like on a first visit, and almost nothing out there is actually finished.
That matters if you're an Elizabethtown resident trying to time a fall visit, because Stone Gables Estate doesn't run on one calendar. It runs on at least three, and they don't line up the way you'd expect.
Two seasons that overlap instead of splitting cleanly
The property's own posted schedule for 2026 lists the general visiting season as running through November 21, with select open dates from March 28 onward. Separately, the site advertises that the Christmas season opens November 20. Read those two lines quickly and you'd assume there's a tidy handoff, one season ending as the next begins. Look closer and the dates actually cross: the holiday season is set to start a full day before the regular season officially closes.
Practically, that means there isn't a clean gap where the property goes dark between the pumpkin-patch train rides of autumn and the light-up drive-through of winter. If you're planning a visit for late November and you're checking hours online, don't assume you have a narrow window before things "close for the season." Treat the whole stretch from Thanksgiving week forward as one continuous operation with different rules layered on top of each other rather than two neatly separated seasons.
The bigger logistics note, the one longtime locals sometimes forget to mention to newcomers: the National Christmas Center isn't actually on the main estate grounds. Parking for it is off-site, at 48 Industrial Road, with a shuttle running roughly every 30 minutes to the museum itself. If you show up at the address you have bookmarked for Stone Gables Estate expecting to walk straight into 18,000 square feet of vintage Christmas displays, you'll need to redirect to the shuttle lot first.
A three-year project that's now heading into its eighth
Here's the detail that actually reframes how you should think about this place. Back in 2019, when Stone Gables Estate first purchased the shuttered National Christmas Center collection out of Paradise, Pennsylvania, the plan for its permanent home was already public: the Barns of Belmont, a complex of relocated 19th-century barns that was described at the time as a three-year build.
That was seven years ago.
The property's own blog is still posting about the Barns of Belmont as recently as January 2026, and the update amounts to the same non-answer the site has offered for years: the barn complex will include seven structures plus a replica of the original 1867 brick farmhouse, and "more information" will come "once the project is underway." No start date, no revised completion year, just the same holding pattern.
What that means for anyone visiting this fall: the National Christmas Center you'll tour, the one with the 17-foot storefronts recreating 1950s Columbia, Pennsylvania and the collection of more than 1,000 nativities, is not sitting in its intended final location. It's in temporary quarters, waiting on a barn complex that was supposed to take three years and, seven years past that original estimate, still doesn't have a groundbreaking date. The scale explains part of the delay. When complete, the Barns of Belmont is meant to total roughly 84,000 square feet, about three times the footprint of the Star Barn itself. Forty thousand square feet of that is earmarked specifically as the Christmas Center's permanent home, with the rest built out as a dinner theatre and restaurant space designed to seat up to 1,500 people.
The Barns of Belmont isn't the only relocation project sitting in this kind of holding pattern, either. Stone Gables Estate has also owned the 1890s Coleman Chapel out of West Lebanon Township since 2022, with plans to move it stone by stone to the estate. As of late 2023, LebTown reported that the land development plan for the chapel's new site still hadn't been submitted to West Donegal Township, and that once it was, stormwater management planning alone would take another 18 to 24 months before construction on the chapel itself could even begin.
If you live in Elizabethtown and you've watched this property evolve for years without ever seeing the "big one" materialize, this is why. Nothing here is stalled so much as it's operating on a timeline that keeps resetting itself, one township approval and one engineering phase at a time, across more than one project at once.
What's actually finished, and how it got here
The Star Barn Village is the one piece of the property that is genuinely done, and its backstory explains why Abel approaches everything else the same deliberate way.
The original barn was built in 1877 for Colonel John Motter, who made his money selling horses and mules to Union cavalry regiments during the Civil War. For decades it sat along Route 283 in Dauphin County, photographed so often it became one of the most recognized barns in the country, until farming on the site stopped in 1986 and the surrounding land shrank to just a few acres. By the time Abel and his wife Tierney bought it in 2014, the barn was deteriorating badly.
Getting it moved took roughly a year of zoning and preservation work. In October 2015, the National Park Service confirmed the barn would keep its spot on the National Register of Historic Places even after relocation, a green light that mattered because the whole project was privately funded with no public grants or government money involved. Groundbreaking at the new Elizabethtown site happened in March 2016, with Elizabethtown College interns pitching in on event coordination and PR that same spring. A barn-raising festival in the summer of 2017 drew roughly 4,000 volunteers and craftspeople, and the rebuilt venue formally opened in 2018.
What you can visit today includes the Star Barn itself, seating up to 250 on the main floor and another 75 on the mezzanine, with total dining capacity for events reaching 600 across the property. Out front sits Lake Liberty, a one-acre pond with a resident swan named Lincoln, a detail that ties into the property's other centerpiece: the Harrisburg, Lincoln & Lancaster Railroad. The full-scale replica 1868 steam locomotive that runs on it, nicknamed the Leviathan, was built by David Kloke over a ten-year stretch in Chicago before Abel purchased it in 2018. It runs a reproduction of the actual Lincoln funeral car along a stretch of rail bed that the real funeral train used passing through Elizabethtown in 1865.
Even the covered bridge has a relocation story. The Herr's Mill Covered Bridge, built in 1844 and originally spanning Pequea Creek near Ronks, was purchased and moved to the estate in pieces. Its restoration happened in two phases, with the first section completed by March 2019 for vehicle and carriage traffic, and the second section finished around 2022 to let the steam train itself cross the creek.
Why one family keeps doing this
None of this makes obvious business sense on its own, and Abel doesn't pretend otherwise. He and Tierney have 17 children, 12 of them adopted from countries including Thailand, Vietnam, China, Korea, Albania, Haiti, Nigeria, and Bolivia. Net proceeds from Stone Gables Estate go to Brittany's Hope, a nonprofit the family started in memory of their daughter Brittany Ann O'Connell, who died in 1999 during her senior year of college. The nonprofit funds international special-needs adoption grants. That mission is the throughline for why a working horse ranch, a wedding venue, a train line, and a Christmas museum all sit on the same acreage under the same slow, patient construction schedule.
Planning around it this fall
If you're weighing a fall visit, keep two things straight. The general season, which includes the pumpkin patch train ride and other autumn programming, runs on select dates through November 21, 2026. The Christmas season is set to begin November 20, ahead of that closing date, so don't wait for an official "off season" gap that the calendar doesn't actually leave you. And if the National Christmas Center is your destination, plan for the shuttle from Industrial Road rather than driving straight to the main estate entrance.
The property is going to look at least a little different the next time you visit, and the time after that, because it was never built to be finished on a single timeline. That's been true since 2014, and based on where the Barns of Belmont stand right now, it'll likely stay true for a while longer.
Keeping up with what changes and what doesn't in this part of Lancaster County is a big part of how The Steve Hammond Team works with buyers and sellers around Elizabethtown. If you're thinking about a move in this market and want a read on the neighborhood from people who actually live here, schedule a free consultation and let's talk about what you're looking for.
