The Greenfield Recorder ran a piece about Ashfield’s Fall Festival in the Oct. 4
edition. It includes a joyful photo from 2024 and exudes enthusiasm. As a resident of Ashfield, I appreciate the attention to this wonderful annual fair.
I’m writing to underscore the misconception that this event started in 1970. 2025 is not,
according primary source material, the event’s 255th year as stated in this newspaper article. The other misconception is that Fall Festival started as a fundraiser for an Ashfield scholarship fund, though it is true that in the second year of Fall festival a portion of the proceeds were set aside for scholarships.
The fair in its earliest years went under six different names, including Fall Festival. By 1972 it was uniformly referred to as Fall Festival. The following is the result of my research, version that previously appeared in The Ashfield News.
St. John’s Episcopal Church started what eventually became know as Fall Festival in 1969, then called the October 4 Fair. Initially it was conceived as a Christmas Fair, according to St. John’s Vestry Minutes of March 1969. At some point the name of the event shifted. Six months later there was a request for “help to prepare balsam needles to stuff pillows in preparation for the October 4 Fair.” This was the first fall fundraising event of its kind in Ashfield in the 1960s and 1970s. The Fair netted a whopping $911.64 ($8,047.67 in 2025 dollars), so they must have been selling a lot more than balsam pillows. As yet no other primary source material has surfaced to tell more of the 1969 story. According to the Vestry Minutes it was “an exclusive St. John’s enterprise.”
These were the years when the two Ashfield churches shared periodic services, a Sunday School, facilities, a minister and a parsonage for the minister and family. Each church had its own governance structure and fundraisers, with the exception of an occasional joint auction. The Ladies’ Circle Minutes of First Church record its main fundraiser in the late 1960s and into 1970s as its Annual Fair in July.
St. John’s repeated the fair in 1970, calling it this time alternately “Autumn Festival’ and
“Fall Festival.” It was advertised in the Greenfield Recorder (Sept. 23, 1970) as “Autumn
Festival” to be held on Oct. 3 and 4 in lower Town Hall. It was a major fundraiser for the church. The Recorder announced, “An all day pie making will again be held at the Joseph Barry’s in the Coach House Inn kitchen.” Frances Gray, writing six years later, reported that 150 apple pies were made. St. John’s events in Lower Town Hall were listed: an ABC sale (attic, basement, cupboard) (Mrs. Robert Shepard), books (Clayton Craft), and homemade food featuring apple pies (Louise Harriman). St. John’s invited the Ashfield Grange and First Church’s Ladies’ Circle to participate — the Grange offered apples by the pound and Vermont cheddar cheese, and First Church offered tables for gifts and attic treasures. Marian Gray ran a snack bar featuring roast beef sandwiches, apple pie and cheese.
St. John’s Vestry Minutes, First Church Ladies’ Circle Minutes and the Greenfield Recorder refer to the event variously between 1969 and 1972: Christmas Fair, October 4 Fair, Fall Festival, Weekend Festival, Autumn Festival and The Autumn Festival. By 1972 it is uniformly referred to as Fall Festival. Members of both churches were actively involved starting in 1970.
Unmentioned in the 1970 Recorder article is the showcasing of local artists and craftspeople and the raising of scholarship funds, both started in that year; they became the hallmarks of the Ashfield Fall Festival. Thanks to the minutes of First Church’s Ladies Circle, we can pin down the year in which the scholarship fund began, because St. John’s parishioner Ruth Craft announced, “St. John’s [held a] successful weekend and Art Exhibit and that there was to be the starting of a Citizen’s Scholarship for local students.”
In 2012, David Fessenden videotaped a group of residents discussing their long-ago involvement in Fall Festival’s early years. Mimi Pieropan recalled, “Norm Pike was a woodworker and I was a painter, and we had a lot of friends who did art and craft. Norm and I got together and rented [the second floor of Town Hall] for $25.” Norm was a member of St. John’s and Mimi of First Church.
The idea for a scholarship fund came to Mimi when she attended a 1970 Mohawk graduation. She noticed there were no scholarships going to Ashfield graduates; they went to graduates from other towns. She started the scholarship fund as a part of the proceeds of Fall Festival. On Feb. 3, 1971 St. John’s Vestry Minutes record $25 from the church’s Fall Festival proceeds going to the Citizen’s Scholarship Fund.
Mimi made another observation about an intention of this important community event that is worth repeating: “If we had a real purpose to this Fall Festival, we could get everybody involved. We had a lot of new people coming in [to town]; some craftspeople. This focus of getting everybody [something] to plug into, one way or another, was the idea of the scholarship program. From Ashfield people to Ashfield students.”
Over the course of the next few years, as Fall Festival grew by leaps and bounds, exhibits of arts and crafts and money raised for scholarships emerged at the core of the Festival. St. John’s role in Fall Festival became equivalent to that of many organizations and community groups who joined the action.
The second issue of the newly created Ashfield News in 1976 noted the growth of Fall Festival from a small church fair to a community-wide event. It is fortunate that several primary source records help us answer the question, when did Ashfield’s Fall Festival
begin and for what reasons?
Jody Hall lives in Ashfield.