The Snohomish Festival of Pumpkins was never one event in one place. It was a handshake between neighbors.
How it started
Sometime around 2002, a group of family-owned farms in the Snohomish River Valley decided to promote their fall seasons together. Each farm kept doing its own thing, with its own patch, its own maze and its own hayrides. What they shared was a name, a map and a website (this one), so a family driving up from Seattle could plan a whole day instead of a single stop.
We don’t have the founding paperwork, but the Everett Herald called the 2006 season the “fifth annual Festival of Pumpkins.” That year’s lineup was Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Patch, Carleton Farm, Craven Farm, Pumpkin Place, Stocker Farms and The Farm at Swan’s Trail. Over the years the group grew to seven farms.
Farmers keeping farms in business
The reason behind it was practical. The farms banded together to build agricultural tourism and bring in more business, because a pumpkin patch that pays its way is a farm that stays a farm. One of the founding members, Bob Ricci, had turned a former dairy into a pumpkin farm that grew from three acres to more than 30. In 2014 festival manager Debbie Carlson-Gould told the Herald the goal was to make Snohomish the pumpkin capital of the Northwest.
Visitors showed up. By the mid-2010s the festival farms were drawing around 200,000 people each fall, and some listings put the number closer to 240,000. For a cluster of farms on a river floodplain, that’s a lot of wheelbarrows.
Pumpkins in town, too
The festival spilled into downtown Snohomish. In 2006 the farms supplied the racing pumpkins for a Pumpkin River Race at Kla Ha Ya Park on First Street, one of a string of October events that also included a pet costume contest and pumpkin painting at the Pumpkin Lane gazebo.
The Pumpkin Hurl years
In 2008 the festival added the event a lot of people still remember: the Snohomish Pumpkin Hurl, held at Alexander Farm on Ebey Island. Teams brought homebuilt trebuchets and catapults and flung 8-pound pumpkins as far as they could. It started as a one-day event, drew around 1,500 people in 2010 and 2011, and stretched to two days in 2012.
As fewer teams built machines, the organizers added a medieval faire around the competition. Knights jousted, Vikings formed shield walls, and kids learned chivalry with foam swords. It became its own kind of tradition. Read the full Pumpkin Hurl story.
Why local still matters
The original festival website ended every season with the same request: keep our local farmers farming. It’s still the right ask. Money spent at a family farm stays in the valley. It pays local wages and keeps fresh food grown nearby. It also keeps open fields open, which matters in a county where farmland gets turned into housing every year.
Where this site goes from here
The farms still run their own fall seasons, and you’ll find them all on our farms page. This website is carrying the name forward as a guide to the valley: farm profiles, fall events, pumpkin know-how, and stories about the local businesses that make the area a good place to spend a Saturday.
Do you have photos, old maps or memories from the early festival years? We’d love to see them. Get in touch.
Dates and details on this page come from Everett Herald coverage between 2006 and 2015 and from the farms’ own descriptions. If you know something we got wrong, tell us and we’ll correct it.