Why does the biggest festival on Laconia's calendar suddenly need two nights instead of one?

If you've walked past the pumpkin tower on Main Street any October since 2015, you already know the outline of Pumpkin Fest. Thousands of carved jack-o'-lanterns stacked downtown, a beer tent between Main and Pleasant, food trucks lining Canal and Hanover. What most residents haven't clocked is that the event they think they know just changed hands, and that handoff is the actual reason this year's festival looks different on paper before a single pumpkin gets carved.

A Festival Laconia Didn't Choose, at First

The pumpkin tower wasn't born here. It started in Keene in 1991 and ran there for 24 years, setting a Guinness World Record of 30,581 lit jack-o'-lanterns in 2013. Then came 2014, when off-campus parties tied to Keene State College turned violent, and the Keene City Council declined to renew the festival's permit for 2015. The festival needed a new home fast, and Charlie St. Clair, the longtime executive director of Laconia Motorcycle Week, brought the idea to the city he already knew could handle a big weekend crowd.

The Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce co-organized that first Laconia-hosted festival in 2015 and ran it solo for the next decade, through a COVID cancellation in 2020, a volunteer-and-funding cancellation in 2021, and a genuine turf fight in early 2024 when the Chamber floated moving the whole thing out to the Weirs Beach boardwalk. The Union Leader reported that Mayor Andrew Hosmer and all six city councilors pushed back hard, arguing that a festival on Lakeside Avenue in late October, when most businesses there are closed for the season, would lose the flavor that made it work downtown in the first place.

The Handoff Nobody Announced Loudly

That fight mattered because a year later, the city didn't just win the argument. It took the job.

In April 2025, on the festival's 10th anniversary in Laconia, city leaders held a press conference outside City Hall where Chamber president Karmen Gifford performed what the Laconia Daily Sun called a ceremonial pumpkin hand-off, officially passing organizing duties to the city's own Parks & Recreation department.

"We are now rebranding it to the Laconia Pumpkin Festival, making it ours, making it significant, making it unique to us," Parks & Recreation Director Amy Lovisek said at the handoff.

That single sentence is the whole story. For ten years, Pumpkin Fest was a tenant on Laconia's calendar, run by a nonprofit and a chamber of commerce that could, in theory, decide to take it somewhere else, as the 2024 dispute nearly proved. Now it's city infrastructure, budgeted and staffed the same way the city handles its Fourth of July celebration or leaf pickup. That's not a cosmetic change. It's the difference between a festival that could leave and one that isn't going anywhere.

The Numbers That Made Expansion an Easy Call

Running your first festival as the actual owner is a test, and Laconia's Parks & Recreation staff passed it convincingly. According to a recap given to the city council and covered by Citizen Portal, the October 25, 2025 festival drew an estimated 20,000 visitors in a single day, hosted 82 craft vendors and 91 regular vendors, and moved 176 T-shirts and 42 souvenir mugs at the merchandise table. Police reported no major calls tied to the event, and Public Works had the downtown streets fully cleared by 10:30 the following morning.

That's the baseline that let the city say yes to more. The same council recap noted organizers' plan to shift the event to the Friday-Saturday weekend before Halloween and to explore nonprofit status for the festival going forward. Both of those ideas are now live for 2026.

Weirs Beach's tourism site frames the 2026 event as the second annual Laconia Pumpkin Festival under the city's new branding, even though it's the eleventh consecutive year the pumpkin tower has gone up somewhere in downtown Laconia. Two different clocks, both worth knowing if you've been coming since the early years and wondered why the anniversary numbers never quite line up.

What's Actually New on the Ground This Year

The City of Laconia's official events page confirms the 2026 dates as October 23 and 24, with a structure that didn't exist a year ago:

Saturday still opens with the Runaway Pumpkin 10K and 5K run and walk, a course that circles views of Lake Opechee and includes a Kids Fun Run with youth discounts. The Pumpkin Express train, run through Granite State Scenic Railway, still departs from the historic downtown train station, with a longer turkey dinner version of the ride available Friday afternoon for anyone who wants foliage views of Lake Winnisquam before the festival crowd builds. The juried craft and art show, now produced in partnership with The Great New England Craft & Artisan Shows, sets up near the iconic pumpkin tower and close to the 1823 Belknap Mill, the mill building that's been the quiet backdrop to festival photos for years.

If you've never treated Friday as more than a warmup, this is the year that changes. It's the first time the city has built an actual second night into the schedule instead of letting Saturday carry the whole event alone.

Where Downtown Actually Eats This Weekend

A two-day festival means two days of feeding a crowd, and downtown Laconia has more standing options than it did even a couple of years ago.

• The Flip Side, at 566 Main Street, opened to fill a gap that had existed since the old Soda Shoppe closed: a full breakfast and lunch spot right in the center of downtown, run by owner Jeanin Onos and her sister Dawn Souda. It's the practical call for a post-race breakfast after the Saturday morning 5K, open Thursday through Monday starting at 7 am.
• Local Eatery, founded in 2012 by the late chef Kevin Halligan, has been the anchor for farm-to-table dinner downtown for over a decade, sourcing from local New Hampshire farms and producers rather than running a generic menu.
• Junction Restaurant & Provisions, over in Lakeport, gives you an option a short drive from the festival grounds if downtown seating fills up, which it will.
• Tavern 27 rounds out the list as one of the more consistently mentioned dinner spots by people making the Meredith-to-Laconia loop on festival weekends.

With a Friday night now built into the schedule, dinner reservations before the 4 pm soft opening or after the Saturday crush are both realistic for the first time. Plan accordingly.

What This Means If You Live Here

The practical takeaway for a Laconia resident isn't which food truck to hit first. It's that this event just became permanent civic infrastructure rather than a rented weekend, and permanent events grow. Expect Main, Canal, and Pleasant Streets to close longer than they used to. Expect a Friday evening crowd that didn't exist before, which changes parking calculus if you live or work downtown. Expect the city to keep tuning the format year over year now that it owns the risk and the upside directly, instead of negotiating both with an outside nonprofit.

If you've treated Pumpkin Fest as background noise for a decade, this is the first year it's worth actually building a weekend around. Get downtown Friday evening before the Saturday crowd arrives, and you'll see a different, quieter version of an event you thought you already knew.

Laconia keeps changing in small, specific ways like this, from who owns its signature festival to which storefronts fill the gaps on Main Street. If you're weighing a move within the Lakes Region or wondering what a particular block of downtown is actually worth in this market, Michelle Gannon has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of local detail. Contact Michelle to discuss your next move.