If you tried to sign up as a vendor for this year's Pumpkin Regatta today, you were too late. The Goffstown Main Street Program closed vendor registration on September 13, meaning the roughly 90 booths that lined Main Street last year are already spoken for, more than a month before a single pumpkin gets weighed. That is not a scheduling quirk. It is the clearest sign of how far this thing has grown since a handful of people first hollowed out oversized squash and floated them down the Piscataquog River around the turn of the millennium.

Most residents know the regatta as the weekend the giant pumpkins show up. Fewer stop to notice that the event has quietly outgrown its own footprint, forcing the town and its Main Street organization to keep adding infrastructure just to keep pace: longer road closures, a free shuttle, a waitlist for vendors who used to be able to walk up. The pumpkins are the spectacle. The logistics are the real story of what's happened to this corner of Goffstown Village every fall.

From a River Stunt to a Two-Day Shutdown

The tradition traces back to a pumpkin regatta organized in Goffstown around 2000 or 2001, inspired by a similar event that started in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1999. What began as an oddball afternoon on the Piscataquog has become the Goffstown Main Street Program's flagship event, run in partnership with the New Hampshire Giant Pumpkin Growers Association, a group founded in part by longtime Goffstown grower Jim Beauchemin. Twenty-some years in, the event now draws crowds that organizers describe as growing every single year.

The growth shows up in the pumpkins themselves. A 1,593-pound entry from Henniker grower Bruce Whittier set a state record back in 2011. By 2022, a pumpkin weighing more than a ton, over 2,300 pounds, showed up at the Goffstown weigh-off, edging closer to the world record of 2,749 pounds set by a Minnesota grower in 2023. The gourds keep getting heavier because the growers keep getting better at it, and the weigh-off has become the venue where that competition plays out in public, on a scale, in front of a crowd that didn't exist twenty years ago.

What Actually Closes, and When

The part residents feel most directly is the road closure. For the 2025 event, Main Street between Depot Street and Elm Street shut down from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday, with organizers publishing a full detour map so regular traffic could still move through the Village. If this year's closure follows the same pattern, expect similar rerouting:

• Elm Street to South Mast Street traffic detoured via North Mast Street, then White Street, then Church Street, then Kendal Hadley Row, then Depot Street
• South Mast Street to North Mast Street traffic detoured via Depot Street, then Kendal Hadley Row, then Church Street
• Route 13 to South Mast Street traffic rerouted along a similar loop through North Mast Street

That is not a minor inconvenience. It is an eight-hour closure of the Village's main artery, two days in a row, and it is the reason the Main Street Program added a free shuttle service last year so visitors would not circle the block hunting for parking. Tina Lawton, the board president of the Main Street Program, has pointed to families driving in from out of state and, in one case, a couple who came from Florida just to see the event. That is the kind of pull that turns a neighborhood festival into a traffic management problem, in the best possible sense.

The Weigh-In Saturday, the Race Sunday

The event splits cleanly into two acts. Saturday is the Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off, where growers from around the state, and sometimes from Massachusetts, bring in specimens that often top 1,000 pounds. Once the winners are recorded, the real transformation starts. Volunteers hollow out the pumpkins with saws, scoop out what one longtime observer described as more pumpkin blood than pumpkin guts, and turn the shells into makeshift boats.

Sunday belongs to the river. Costumed paddlers, and a few motorized entries, race the hollowed pumpkins down the Piscataquog to the Main Street bridge in front of a crowd that lines both banks. Recent years have leaned into themes: 2024's race went pirate, with Foremost Builders entering a vessel called "The Grim Gourd" captained by Chase Pyer, while Mountain Base Yoga's rider Emma Garvey, dressed as a rat and steering what she called their least elaborate but funniest entry, took first place anyway. That same pirate-themed race also featured the Village Trestle's "Captain Jack" Patty Conroy and a rider from the Congregational Church of Goffstown dressed as Noah, steering an ark made of pumpkin. In 2025, the theme shifted to Alice in Wonderland, and the race came down to a paddle's length between Kristal Delahanty of Gotta Go Pet Care and Zeb Groover of the Granite YMCA, with Delahanty edging ahead to tag the finish first. That same 2025 weekend brought one of the event's most memorable stunts, when Boisvert Brothers Tree Services used a crane to lift a 1,000-pound pumpkin some 200 feet above the river and drop it in, just for the splash.

None of this year's theme has been announced yet, but the pattern of the last several years suggests residents should expect something similarly playful when the weekend arrives.

Why the Flagship Event Matters the Rest of the Year

Here is the part that gets lost in the pumpkin jokes. The Goffstown Main Street Program is a volunteer nonprofit whose entire job is to keep the historic business district on Main Street viable, walkable, and worth visiting. The regatta is not a side project for that group. It is described on the organization's own materials as its flagship event, the single weekend that draws the most vendors, the most visitors, and the most attention to the storefronts that make up the Village.

That matters if you live here and shop, eat, or walk on Main Street the other 363 days of the year. An organization that can pull off a two-day festival with 90-plus vendors and a coordinated traffic plan is the same organization working, on a smaller and quieter scale, to keep that stretch of road functioning as a real downtown rather than a pass-through. The pumpkin boats are the visible part. The unglamorous work of maintaining a business district happens because an event like this exists to fund and energize it.

Planning Around It This Year

If you are local and just want to eat before the crowds show up, Putnam's Waterview Restaurant in the center of the Village has long been a go-to for a sit-down meal with a view of the action, and Goffstown House of Pizza, which opened in the same Main Street spot that has cycled through several pizza shops over the years, is a reliable grab-and-go option before or after the race. Saturday's weigh-off tends to draw a steadier, more manageable crowd through the morning, while Sunday afternoon's race is when Main Street and the riverbank fill in fastest. If you plan to drive anywhere near Depot Street or Elm Street on either day, build in extra time for the detour, or look into whether the shuttle is running again this year before you circle for parking.

The dates for 2026 are set for October 17 and 18. Vendor spots are already gone. The pumpkins are still growing in fields around the state, aiming for another record. The only real question left is how much bigger this one keeps getting.

If you are weighing a move to Goffstown, or already live here and are curious what your home might be worth heading into fall, Michelle Gannon knows this Village as well as she knows the towns around it. Contact Michelle to talk through your next move in Goffstown or anywhere in Southern New Hampshire.