Pumpkin festival celebrates 20th anniversary

Thursday, October 8, 2009

By KATHY CLEVELAND

Staff Writer

MILFORD – For most people, the Pumpkin Festival is just a weekend of fun in October.

For Marilyn Kenison, it is a vital part of Milford history.

Kenison was the chairwoman of the Town Hall Auditorium Restoration Committee in 1989 when the committee came up with the idea of selling local pumpkins to raise he $267,000 to pay off the cost of extensive auditorium renovations.

The Town Hall’s restoration had been funded by a voter-approved bond issue, but residents decided that the auditorium should be paid for with donations and fundraising.

Once “one of the most magnificent civic buildings in New Hampshire,” wrote the late Patti Rotch in the 1988 Town Report.

And its auditorium had been a place where townspeople enjoyed concerts, plays, basketball games, fairs and dances.

By the late 1980s the auditorium was in sad shape after years of neglect.

“Plaster was falling from the ceiling, the faded outline of an old basketball court could still be seen on the scarred floor, the windows were in bad shape and partly obscured,” said Kenison, this week in an e-mail from her home in Maine.

“Imagine what it would cost to reproduce that amount of space in today’s dollars?” she said.

Now the auditorium is again used for concerts, dances, fairs and parties, and in 1993 the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave Milford two awards, one for the Town Hall restoration and the other for the auditorium.

“The Pumpkin Festival has provided more to the town than just many years of fun,” Kenison said. It has played a part in Milford’s history.

Kenison remembers that the original fundraising idea was to sell pumpkins off the back of a truck, “sort of like the Good Humor ice cream truck.

“The goal was to have a pumpkin on every doorstep. We eventually scrapped that idea as we got involved in making the Oval the center of most events,“ she said. “But pumpkin sales have always been the focus of the festival. Thanks to Bob Kokko and his family, there were always plenty of pumpkins.”

Kenison has vivid memories of the first festival, including the “torrential rain” from a hurricane, as well as the “huge numbers of people who turned out despite the rain, ” and “the hardest working, most dedicated group of volunteers I have ever worked with.”

Tracy Bardsley, director of the Downtown Ongoing Improvement Team remembers enjoying the festival with her two children when they were toddlers 10 years ago. This year they will be helping their mother.

“The festival has really become part of the fabric of the town,” she said. “Lots of groups want to participate, so it is “bursting at the seams” with vendors and organizations.