P3 NEWS

The Pumpkin Show has always been about farming and economic prosperity growing together

Pumpkin Show · By Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Circleville’s iconic annual event began in 1903 with about 30 feet of table space outside a downtown office. This year it expects close to half a million visitors, and it opens as the county weighs how to protect its farmland while embracing new jobs and opportunity.

Originally published in the Circleville Herald (opens in a new tab, leaving the Pickaway Progress Partnership website).

Circleville, Ohio, with October under way. Streets packed with thousands of visitors, many of them from out-of-town. Pumpkins of all shapes, sizes, and colors on display, along with crafts and baked goods. A baby judging contest, and exhibits open from dawn to dusk.

The most recent incarnation of the Circleville Pumpkin Show?

Try the pumpkin show 117 years ago, in 1909, already a regional blockbuster of an event a mere six years after its founding.

“An institution in Central Ohio,” the Columbus Evening Dispatch called it in an article from those early years.

The sentiment is true more than a century later as the 119th iteration of The Show prepares to kick off Oct. 21, this time with crowds expected to number close to half a million. With an eye both on the past and the future, the show this year kicks off early, with a parade timed to America’s 250th birthday by celebrating 250 years of agriculture.

“As you get into this time of year, you live and breathe pumpkin show,” said Marc Rogols, the current Pumpkin Show president.

Despite its almost instant popularity, the event began quietly in 1903 when Circleville Mayor George Haswell invited area farmers to display their best produce in front of the Ohio Water Service Company downtown office, where Haswell was superintendent. Corn fodder and pumpkins decorated the storefront, and squash, corn, potatoes, and a few other products were displayed along about thirty feet of table space. Most of the items, however, were pumpkins, including many carved into jack-o’-lanterns. The Yellowbud Band played music to entertain visitors who hitched their horses and walked up and down the street. The small presentation filled a gap: at the time, Pickaway County lacked a traditional county fair, the practice having been abandoned after a heyday in the mid-1800s.

Other merchants joined Haswell the following year to grow the exhibition and the show quickly became a regional attraction. Within just a couple of years, the Scioto Valley Traction Company offered pumpkin show rides from Columbus to Circleville on the company’s electric interurban railway. As early as 1908, 10,000 people attended the show on a Saturday.

Only four times since 1903—once during World War I, twice during World War II, and once during the coronavirus epidemic—was the show not staged. In 1946, the nonprofit The Circleville Pumpkin Show, Inc. was formed to formally run the event, while the county agricultural society began the Pickaway County Fair. The result: today, at a time when many farm-related festivals are shrinking or disappearing, the county is the rare community nationally with two annual events celebrating agriculture.

Other fairs will boast of pumpkins weighing more than a ton vying for the top prize. But in Circleville, the pumpkins on display must be grown locally, another nod to the county’s agricultural heritage. In 1928, the 25th anniversary of the show, one of the biggest pumpkins weighed an impressive 66 pounds. Fast forward nearly a century to 2023, when the top prize went to Bob and Jo Liggett for a pumpkin weighing in at 2,388.5 pounds, the current pumpkin show record.

In 2024, the five-day show attracted 400,000 people, swelling the population of Circleville, normally around 14,000. Many visitors hail from the region but also across the country and even abroad, making the show the country’s sixth-largest festival. The show has a direct economic impact of $3.3 million on the local economy, and adds $700,000 in income to local workers, according to a 2025 economic impact study by Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service.

The show’s future is undoubtedly bright. But it also unfolds this year as Pickaway County explores what its own future looks like. The county, a traditional agricultural stronghold, has become the focus of large development projects that present both challenges and opportunities.

The most recent newcomer: drone manufacturer Anduril Industries, whose factory on the county’s northern edge will create as many as 4,000 jobs in the near future. Meanwhile, over $40 billion is being invested across the central Ohio region, with significant development projects happening in northern Pickaway County as well as the US-23 corridor. Central Ohio is expected to grow from 2.25 million (2024) to over 3 million in 2050 according to the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission.

As Pickaway County prepares for that growth, the Pumpkin Show offers a reminder of the agricultural life that has long shaped the community. The challenge is to keep that way of life economically viable for the next generation while making room for new jobs and investment.

Pickaway Progress Partnership, the county’s nonprofit economic development agency known as P3, convened a 17-member committee of farmers, landowners and agribusiness leaders to guide the recently concluded Pickaway County “Future of Agriculture Study.” More than 450 people took part, including almost 100 high school students. The study describes itself as “a step toward creating a future with agriculture as the heart of a growing community.” Committee member Maria Roberts of Richards Farms called it “a chance for farmers in the area to get a voice into that economic development.”

Today, Pickaway County remains an agricultural powerhouse. Its 760 farms cover 283,000 acres, or 88 percent of the county, and produce $250 million in annual market value. Most of that comes from corn, soybeans and wheat, though some farmers also raise livestock and poultry. Pickaway is one of the few Ohio counties with that kind of farm economy on the edge of a growing metropolitan area, and the study describes the county as well positioned for agricultural innovation, diversification and preservation.

Some of what the study hopes to protect is already visible in how local operations work together. About half the corn Richards Farms grows each year is cut for silage and delivered to Miedema Dairy. Jay Wippel, a farmer and Pickaway County commissioner (who also served on the committee), does the chopping, and the manure goes back onto the fields that grew the corn. “It’s a circle,” said Itske Miedema (who served on the agriculture study committee), who built the dairy with her husband, Andy. “The manure is a fertilizer, and then the corn grows.”

The study sets three goals, drawn from what residents told its authors: balance agriculture and development, help the next generation of farmers get started, and keep the community involved as planning decisions are made. The county lost about 13,800 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022, and the recommendations are meant to give farmers, local governments and residents a shared plan for what comes next. The study also recommends that the Agriculture Committee, a volunteer group of people with deep farming backgrounds that P3 formed, stay together to carry the work forward.

The next generation of farmers is part of that picture. “A lot of the other young folks around here are also excited to take over farming, and not as inclined to sell their land to developments,” said Sytske Miedema, Itske’s daughter. “So it makes me optimistic about the future.”

“It’s up to us as residents to be able to identify places where okay growth is happening, and places where we want to preserve land,” said current Circleville Mayor Michelle Blanton.

Wippel, who also sits on the P3 board, said the history and culture of the pumpkin show demonstrate how agriculture and growth can work toward the same ends. “Our population is growing, and so many of them are not involved with agriculture. All those folks want jobs as well. They want to keep their children here. That’s why it’s important that we develop those opportunities in concert with keeping agriculture number one in the county. And I think both can coexist that way.”

Itske Miedema sees the same possibility. “I am optimistic for the future in Pickaway County, for farmers and industry,” she said. “I think a good combination is possible.”

The Pickaway County commissioners have been steadfast in their support of agriculture south of State Route 762, said Rogols, the Pumpkin Show president who is also county administrator. That support is reflected in the pumpkin show’s past, present, and future championing of farming.

“I can’t predict the future, but there is a strong commitment to agriculture here,” Rogols said. “And the pumpkin show [is] not going to change, we’ve been agriculture since day one, and always will be.”