NH Pumpkin Festival seeks crowdfunding for iconic tower

LACONIA — When the New Hampshire Pumpkin Festival made its post-pandemic return last year, attendees were grateful to see it. But they did miss its iconic pumpkin tower. 

To bring back the crowd-pleaser, organizers have turned to a popular form of crowdfunding: a GoFundMe dedicated solely toward funding the gourd-filled gateway to the festival went live this week. To check it out, visit gofund.me/6df4019c.

“Last year, everyone missed the tower, but the tower comes with a price tag,” said Karmen Gifford, event organizer and Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce president. “Being a street festival, we don't have tickets, so we don't have ticket revenue to offset some of that.”

A GoFundMe campaign, she continued, would be an easy way for festival lovers and attendees to support their favorite feature ahead of this year’s festival, set for Friday and Saturday, Oct. 27-28. With a $10,000 goal, those who donate will be entered into a raffle, according to the festival's Facebook page.

The famous pumpkin tower is a 34-foot-tall triangular scaffolding structure that, when filled with jack-o-lanterns, bathes downtown in a flickering amber glow. It’s a longtime staple of the festival in each of its locations, but was cut from the festival last year because the needed resources were not within reach.

The ambition this year is for the tower to stand guard over a pedestrian-only Veterans Square as a two-sided structure featuring pumpkins carved — and potentially even grown — by students of Laconia schools.

With engineering, setup and takedown, the tower has costs in the low five figures. Because the event is volunteer-run and organized by Gifford and a small team at the chamber, the tower can not happen without a groundswell of enthusiasm. 

“We're really looking for the community, if they loved the tower and they want to make sure that that tower comes back and that we can keep growing, we would love to have their support,” Gifford said. A GoFundMe campaign is a familiar avenue to drum up such support. “If everyone attending gave $1, that would more than cover the cost of the tower.” 

The crowdfunding call is part of organizers’ broader efforts to tie in community support early and in myriad ways for this year’s festival. Other endeavors in the works include orange vinyl window hangings with a QR code to the festival's website to be hung in the windows of local businesses, a goal to revamp the PumpCANALly events on Canal Street by painting the street orange and centralizing the art walk there, to a potential pumpkin-themed restaurant week, a “Christmas in July”-esque summer pumpkin event and a community mural initiative where local or student artists could create pumpkin-themed decorations around the region to be shared online to amp up pre-festival excitement. 

“I'm really excited because we have a lot of people that have been helping early which has been, I think, an important part of seeing the community engagement — that it's not just the chamber that's working on it,” Gifford said.