Camille turned 33 this June. She is a great-grandmother several times over, she still gets escorted by tour guides who point her out to visiting kids, and she has spent her entire life on the same 900 acres off Highway 40. Camille is a giraffe, the first one ever born at Global Wildlife Center, and this June the center's staff quietly noted that she is now the second-oldest giraffe in North America. She was there before most of Folsom's newer subdivisions existed. She will likely outlast this fall's ticket stubs, hat contests, and chili trophies by a decade or more.
That single fact says something about how Folsom works that a list of "things to do this fall" usually misses. This is a town where a wildlife preserve, a polo farm, a licensed horse trial, and a homegrown chili cook-off can all draw a crowd within a few weeks of each other, and the reason isn't a packed events calendar or a tourism board working overtime. It's that Folsom still has the one resource all four of those events actually require: enough open, contiguous land to hold them.
The Giraffe Who Has Seen the Town Grow
Global Wildlife Center opened in 1991, which makes this its 35th year on the same stretch of Highway 40. Executive director Christina Cooper started as a new graduate in 1996 and spent the years through 2010 working what she has described as every position on the property before eventually taking the top job, which is its own small story about how few people actually leave once they've worked here. The center is marking the anniversary with a monthlong celebration of Camille, its founding giraffe and, by staff accounts, the herd's matriarch.
The other headline from this season is smaller but tells the same story. A scimitar-horned oryx calf was born on the property this year, likely just hours before staff spotted it on a tour. The species was declared extinct in the wild in 2000. It exists today only because of reintroduction and private breeding efforts, and Global Wildlife's herd, now standing at 13 animals, is part of that math. Staff point to the center's roaming acreage as the reason the population keeps growing on its own, since animals that have enough space to behave naturally tend to also breed naturally.
None of this requires a ticket beyond the standard wagon tour, which still runs daily except for the center's January maintenance closure. But it is worth knowing what you are actually looking at on that tour this fall: not just giraffes and zebras, but one of the only places in the country where a species written off twenty-five years ago is quietly rebuilding itself.
Grass Long Enough for a Chukka
On October 18, the New Orleans Polo Club brings its fourth annual Autumn Polo Classic to Summergrove Farm in Folsom, with proceeds benefiting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. More than 400 patrons are expected for two matches, a "Pretty Woman" hat contest, and the halftime divot stomp, where spectators walk the field to press the turf back down after the ponies have torn it up. It is a fundraiser first, but it is also a reminder that a regulation polo field runs close to 300 yards long and nine acres in size, which is not a patch of land most Northshore towns have sitting around unbuilt.
Folsom does. That's less an accident of zoning than a byproduct of exactly the same rural character that draws people here in the first place.
A Licensed Show Two Roads Over
Three weeks later, on November 7 and 8, Lagniappe Equestrian Center hosts the Fleur de Leap Horse Trials, a USEA-licensed eventing competition on Verger Road. Eventing pairs a horse and rider through dressage, cross-country, and show jumping phases, and a licensed event means the footing, the fences, and the course design have all been vetted by the sport's governing body. That's a different category from a backyard schooling show. It means Folsom has land laid out well enough, and maintained well enough, to host a sanctioned competition that draws entries from well outside St. Tammany Parish.
Stack that alongside the polo grounds and the wildlife preserve and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence. Three very different equestrian and wildlife operations, each needing open acreage measured in the dozens or hundreds, all functioning within a few miles of each other. That kind of density of large-format outdoor space isn't something a town can zone into existence after the fact. It has to already be there.
The Version Folsom Throws for Itself
Then there's the festival with no admission fee and no governing body. The Village of Folsom, together with Wholesome Folsom, puts on the Folsom Fall Festival at Town Hall and Moise Park in late September, ahead of the region's bigger October festivals. Expect a chili cook-off, antique tractors on display, a farmers market, food trucks, hayrides, crafts, and, in past years, a mechanical bull. It's a homegrown counterpart to the polo classic and the wildlife center, run by the town for the town rather than by a nonprofit or a private farm.
The contrast matters. One weekend, Folsom hosts a black-tie-adjacent fundraiser on a manicured polo field. A few weeks later, the same town gathers around folding tables and a chili pot at its own Town Hall. Both events depend on the same open land and the same small population willing to show up for something local. That's a town that hasn't outgrown itself, even as the events on its calendar have gotten more elaborate.
What the Acreage Actually Buys
Here's the quick version of the fall calendar, if you're mapping out weekends:
- Now through October: Global Wildlife Center's 35th anniversary season, daily wagon tours, and the ongoing story of Camille and the center's growing oryx herd
- Late September: Folsom Fall Festival at Town Hall and Moise Park, chili cook-off and hayrides included
- October 18: Autumn Polo Classic at Summergrove Farm, benefiting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
- November 7 to 8: Fleur de Leap Horse Trials at Lagniappe Equestrian Center on Verger Road
None of these events would fit comfortably in Covington's downtown grid or Mandeville's lakefront blocks. They need room to spread out, and Folsom has kept that room even as the rest of St. Tammany Parish has filled in around it. That's worth sitting with the next time you're at the wildlife center and it occurs to you that Camille has been standing on the same acreage since before most of the parish's current subdivisions had a name. The land didn't get more valuable because it holds a giraffe. It holds a giraffe, a polo field, and a licensed cross-country course because it never stopped being land first.
If a season like this one ever has you wondering what a piece of that acreage is actually worth, or what it takes to buy or sell a property built around exactly this kind of space, the team at Jennifer Rice has spent years working Folsom's farms and open-lot properties and is glad to talk through what the land supports, long before you need a listing agent for it. You can also browse our Folsom neighborhood guide for a closer look at what's on the market here now.
