The Great Godfrey Maze Isn't Always Corn, and This Year It's Cut Like a Pixar Movie

The Great Godfrey Maze opened for its 2026 run on September 18 at Robert E. Glazebrook Community Park, and the design cut into the field this year is Inside Out, the animated movie about the emotions running a kid's head. That's not a coincidence or a marketing gimmick borrowed from a theme park. The Village of Godfrey redesigns this maze from scratch every single season. Some years it's been a circus. This year it's Pixar. And at least once, the field itself wasn't even corn.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with, because it tells you something about how this town treats a tradition that most places would just let repeat itself year after year.

The Year the Maze Wasn't Corn At All

As Advantage News reported, the Great Godfrey Maze came back in 2022 after a season off. The prior year's corn crop had barely grown, forcing a cancellation. Rather than gamble on corn again, the Village switched to Sunn Hemp, a plant that grows about 12 feet tall and costs roughly half of what a corn field runs. Godfrey's Park and Recreation Director had to clarify publicly that Sunn Hemp and marijuana are not the same plant, which tells you how unusual the switch was for people used to walking through actual cornstalks every autumn. That year's design theme was a circus, "The Greatest Show in Godfrey."

The point isn't that Godfrey's maze is currently made of hemp or corn in any given year. It's that the Village treats this attraction as something to solve for, not something to maintain on autopilot. When the crop failed, they didn't cancel the tradition. They changed the material and kept the tradition alive.

What's Cut Into the Field This Year

The 2026 maze runs weekends from September 18 through November 1, with hours set at Fridays 6 to 10 p.m., Saturdays 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sundays noon to 6 p.m. New this season is the Vortex Tunnel, a walk-through attraction built to throw off your sense of balance, priced separately at $2 per entrance.

The haunted version of the maze, which runs after dark and isn't recommended for children under 10, opens on the first Friday in October and continues through the rest of the season on Friday and Saturday nights.

Pricing for 2026 breaks down like this:

Beyond the maze itself, the park still runs its usual side attractions: the Cow Train for $3 a ride, the Hay Wagon for $3 a ride, and the Jumping Pillow at $3 a jump. The Corn Crib, where younger kids can get hands-on with the crop without throwing it, stays free for anyone 10 and under.

Flashlights are required for anyone walking the maze after dark, and they're sold at the concession stand for $3 if you show up without one. Alcohol isn't permitted on the grounds, and the uneven paths through the field mean it's not a fully wheelchair-accessible attraction.

The Weekend Doesn't End at Glazebrook Park

The Village's Fall Festival lands at Glazebrook Park on Saturday, September 26, starting at 11 a.m., putting a second organized event on the calendar just a week after the maze opened for the season.

A few miles away, the Nature Institute keeps its own fall schedule running through October at the Olin Nature Preserve on Levis Lane. The property has been managed as a land conservation and education nonprofit since 1980, and its trail names tell you what to expect before you even lace up. Deer Trail, marked as the Black Loop, is the longest at roughly three miles and the only one that takes you through the property's full range of terrain, from hill prairie to mature forest. Aune's Trail is a half-mile easy walk through a drier, rockier hillside where chinkapin oak grows in shallow soil that other trees can't handle. The Beaver Trail, over in the Olin Nature Preserve section, is a 2.5-mile moderate loop that ends at Beaver Falls, a small waterfall along the creek, and it stays open only from April through November before closing for winter.

The Nature Institute has a run of scheduled fall programs on the books:

• Moonlight Hike, Sunday, September 27, 7:30 p.m., a night walk through the woods
• Roaming Naturalists: Making the Most of Fall, Tuesday, October 13, 9 a.m., a guided hike through the preserve
• Rock Trail Group Hike, Saturday, October 17, 10 a.m., for Trail Challenge members, passing the Hop Hollow Underground Railroad Monument along the way

None of these require a maze ticket or festival admission. They're separate stops that happen to fall on the same stretch of calendar, which is what makes a Godfrey weekend in October look different from a Godfrey weekend in June. The town isn't adding more of the same thing. It's stacking distinct anchors, a civic festival, a redesigned maze, and a conservation nonprofit's programming, on top of each other in the same six weeks.

Where the Day Ends

If the afternoon runs long enough to need dinner, Delmar Public House sits atop the bluffs at 2926 W. Delmar Avenue, inside a building with its own backstory. As The Telegraph reported, the space used to be the old Melville School House, painted a bright orange for years before owner Mark Pruitt and his wife Melissa spent about six months converting it into a pub after the Village approved their liquor license in May 2024. Pruitt had previously run Bigelo's Bistro in Edwardsville from 2001 until it closed in 2019, and some of that restaurant's dishes made the jump with him, including the spinach salad, the King of Clubs sandwich, and a rotating Bigelo's Pasta special. Layered on top of those holdovers is a menu of English pub standards like fish and chips, cottage pie, and bangers and mash.

The restaurant held its soft opening on a Wednesday night in November 2024 and served around 80 people despite short notice, according to the owner. As of this year it's running a smaller, steadier schedule: Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m., Friday until 9, and Saturday from noon to 9.

If pub food isn't the mood, Bakers & Hale on Montclaire Avenue serves farm-to-table plates in a rustic dining room that sometimes has live music going.

None of this reads like a town filling time until something better opens nearby. A maze that gets rebuilt from the ground up every year, a schoolhouse that took six months to become a pub, and a nature preserve that schedules its hikes around what the season is actually doing. That's not a rerun. That's a place still deciding what its fall looks like, one October at a time.

If you're weighing what it's like to actually live somewhere like Godfrey day to day, not just visit it for a weekend, Kristen Weld has spent years working this stretch of the Metro East and is glad to talk through what a given block or season really feels like before you make any decisions about it. Let's Connect.