On March 3, 2024, an electrical fire tore through the clubhouse at Woods Fort Golf Club in Troy. By the time it was out, the restaurant, the commercial kitchen, the bar, the pro shop and the cart garage were gone. Total loss. Staff spent the following days picking through the ash, and for over a year afterward, golfers checked in from a trailer and ate under a climate-controlled tent while the club figured out what came next.
Six miles west of Elsberry, at the same time, nothing was happening. The Lincoln County Old Threshers Reunion was doing exactly what it has done every third weekend of September since 1970: setting up steam engines, firing up the sawmill, and letting volunteers run an antique tractor pull the same way their predecessors did decades ago.
Two Lincoln County institutions, two completely different relationships with change. One got knocked flat and came back bigger. The other has spent 56 years making sure it never has to change at all. If you live here, both are worth understanding, because together they say something true about this county that a single roundup of "what's new" never quite captures: longevity in Lincoln County doesn't look like one thing. Sometimes it looks like reinvention. Sometimes it looks like refusal.
What Actually Burned, And What Came Back
The fire at Woods Fort wasn't a kitchen mishap or a small setback. It took out a 30-year-old building in its entirety, and Lucy Hughes, President of Walters Golf Management, described the immediate aftermath in blunt terms: "It was shocking, terrifying. I'm so, so grateful that no one was hurt."
What makes the story worth telling isn't the fire. It's what the ownership group, the Thompson and Geeding families, chose to build in its place. Instead of replacing what burned, they expanded it. The new clubhouse added more than 5,000 square feet to the original footprint. The centerpiece is the Horizon Center, a new event space that can hold up to 160 guests for weddings, receptions, and corporate gatherings, a scale the old building never had. The kitchen was rebuilt from scratch by Hughes and executive chef Heather Cooper, who added double stacked ovens, flat grills, and a pizza oven, calling the result "the Cadillac of kitchens." Downstairs, the new pro shop includes three bays of digital golf simulators, so the course now functions as a golf destination even when the weather doesn't cooperate.
The rebuild opened in stages through spring 2025, with the club hosting a "Barn-a-palooza" showcase that March so the community could walk through the finished space before events started booking. None of that was available to Troy residents two years ago. It exists now because the alternative to rebuilding bigger was closing, and the ownership group chose not to.
Six Miles West, Nothing Moved
The Old Threshers Reunion is the opposite kind of institution. It doesn't chase growth. It doesn't add square footage. The Lincoln County Old Threshers Association, a nonprofit run entirely by volunteers, has held the same event at the same location, Walnut Grove Farm at the junction of Highways B and NN, for more than five decades. The lineup barely shifts year to year: steam and gas engine displays, a working sawmill, antique and stock tractor pulls, a horse pull, a flea market, craft booths, live music, and daily threshing demonstrations on equipment that predates most of the attendees.
Following the tradition of running every third weekend in September, this year's reunion falls on Thursday, September 17 through Sunday, September 20, marking the association's 57th year. Admission is ten dollars at the gate and covers all four days, with kids ten and under free. Association president Bryan Gottfried has described the appeal in the plainest possible terms: it's for regulars and first-timers alike, people who show up because the tractor parade and the truck pull are the same ones they remember from years before.
That consistency is the whole point. Where Woods Fort had to reinvent itself to survive a disaster, the Threshers Reunion survives by making sure nothing about it needs reinventing. Both approaches have kept a piece of Lincoln County running for the people who live here.
Here's how the two compare side by side:
| Woods Fort Golf Club | Old Threshers Reunion | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1994 | 1970 |
| What changed | Rebuilt larger after a 2024 fire | Nothing structural since inception |
| This year | New Horizon Center, golf simulators, expanded kitchen | 57th annual reunion, same format |
| Draw | Golf, dining, event hosting | Antique machinery, tractor pulls, flea market |
Why Both Stories Belong Together
It would be easy to write these up as two unrelated items on a fall calendar. But they're answering the same underlying question for anyone who lives in Troy or Elsberry: what does it take for a local institution to last here? The answer isn't one strategy. It's that both strategies work, as long as the people running the place actually mean it. Woods Fort's ownership group could have taken an insurance payout and walked away from a facility that had already run for three decades. Instead they hired Baalman Architects and Martin General Contractors and built something the county didn't have before. The Threshers Association could have modernized the format decades ago, trading tractor pulls for something with wider appeal. Instead they've kept doing the version that works, year after year, because the version that works doesn't need fixing.
That contrast matters more this particular September because both are happening in the same short window. If you're mapping out a weekend, you can watch a horse pull and eat a threshing-day meal at Walnut Grove Farm on Saturday, then drive back into Troy for dinner at a clubhouse that didn't exist in its current form eighteen months ago.
The Rest Of Downtown Troy Didn't Wait Either
While Woods Fort was rebuilding, the rest of Troy's food scene kept moving on its own timeline. Taormina's Sicilian Family Restaurant, run by the Dollard family on East Cherry Street, has built a following on hand-carved prime rib served on weekends and homemade sauces from an owner with three decades in the restaurant business. Bricklayer Bakery turns out fresh bread and sandwiches locals point to specifically, the spring sandwich and the muffulino get named more often than the bakery's name itself. Zadock's remains the family-friendly standby with wheelchair access and a menu built for regulars. And downtown's One-More Shot still marks its spot with a simple storefront and glowing beer signs, the kind of bar where you either grab a stool for conversation or slide into a vinyl booth near the pool tables.
None of these places needed a fire or a milestone anniversary to keep going. They're just part of the daily rhythm that makes Troy function, in the same way Cuivre River State Park, one of the state's largest and most rugged parks, keeps offering hiking and backpacking through its two wild areas whether or not anyone writes about it that week.
Put It On The Calendar
If you're deciding how to spend the next several weekends in Lincoln County, here's what's actually on the ground right now:
- The Old Threshers Reunion runs Thursday, September 17 through Sunday, September 20 at Walnut Grove Farm near Elsberry, ten dollars at the gate for all four days.
- Woods Fort's rebuilt clubhouse and Horizon Center are open for dining, events, and golf simulator play year-round, a genuine change from what existed on that site through most of 2024.
- Downtown Troy's regulars, Taormina's, Bricklayer Bakery, Zadock's, and One-More Shot, are running their usual weekly rhythm, unaffected by either story.
Lincoln County isn't a place where everything gets remodeled and it isn't a place where nothing changes. It's a place where both are true at the same time, a few miles apart, and that's arguably a better description of the county than either story could offer alone.
If you've been thinking about what it actually feels like to live day to day in Troy or Elsberry, not just what a listing says about the area, that's the kind of local detail worth knowing before you make any decision about property here. For questions about homes and neighborhoods throughout Lincoln County, Cheri Norton and her team are happy to talk through what a move here would really look like.
