Sun shines for Pumpkinfest '24

LACONIA — After all the orange-tinted dust had settled on Monday, Karmen Gifford was able to take a breath and reflect on what went right, and what didn’t, during the 2024 New Hampshire Pumpkin Festival.

One side of that ledger was greater than the other.

“I’m feeling that it went very, very well,” said Gifford, president of the Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce, which organizes the downtown street festival. “I heard from the city today, from vendors, from festivalgoers, I’ve been trying to gauge social media responses, it seemed that festivalgoers really enjoyed the layout.” Several vendors did so much business they ran out of food, and the city was able to clean up afterward more easily than in previous configurations.

And on the other side of the equation, “It was the first year that we really had no issues,” she said.

The festival took up the core of downtown streets, which were closed to traffic on Saturday — Pleasant and Main streets, Harvard and Canal streets — with four pumpkin “towers” filled with carved jack-o-lanterns positioned as what Gifford called “anchors” to keep people moving throughout. The heart of the festival was found in the city parking lot between Pleasant and Main, which was filled with a performance stage and a biergarten.

“I’m very pleased with it, I never know how it’s going to go,” Gifford said. “I’m very happy, the city’s happy, and I’m happy that the vendors are happy.” Most importantly, she added, all crowds who attended — and since there are no tickets required to attend, it’s difficult to estimate the size of the crowds — seemed to be enjoying their time in the city.

Though the 2024 iteration of the festival will go down as an apparent success, the year didn’t start off that way. The chamber caused a stir in the early part of the year when it announced this year’s festival would be headquartered at Weirs Beach. At the time, Gifford explained the move was due to logistical challenges with locating the festival in the middle of a busy downtown, which also has fixtures such as a City Hall, health care facilities and businesses that don’t welcome disruption during the Thursday and Friday leading up to the event. Weirs Beach, which is quiet this time of year, doesn’t have any of those complications.

But when the summer started turning into fall, Gifford said, it appeared that Weirs Beach had other problems.

“Back about a month and a half ago, we heard from some of the businesses down there that were struggling with staffing, they were worried that they would be drawing people down there and we wouldn’t be able to support the people,” Gifford said. Instead, the chamber located the festival infrastructure downtown, where it has been held since 2015, and promoted events at The Weirs, as well as at Moulton Farms, Beans & Greens and other locations.

“We still did what we always did, and that was to promote the whole region,” Gifford said.