These Are Pumpkins (10 Photos)

October 18, 2026

By Vidar

Giant Pumpkins That Turned Into Something Else

Every October, the small harbor town of Damariscotta, Maine, lines Main Street with giant pumpkins, some of them over 1,000 pounds. Then volunteers and local artists go to work. Over the years the street has had a mouse, a puffin, a pig and a steam engine, and the river has had pumpkins with people sitting in them.

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🐷 Pink Pig — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Floppy ears, a hot-pink snout, wire eyelashes, two gray spots and bright red lips. The pumpkin was already round enough to be a pig; most of the work was pink paint.

💡 Pumpkin Fact: This pig weighed 726 pounds in 2017. The world record is now more than four times that: 3,156 pounds, weighed by Ron Wallace of Rhode Island on October 10, 2026. It came one week after Ian Paton’s 2,856-pounder set the record in England.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🐡 Puffer Fish — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Strings of mini lights wrapped around a pale, peach-topped pumpkin stand in for spines, with two small gourds for eyes, the stem as a mouth and slices of pumpkin as fins. Up close, every spine is a tiny light bulb.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🐭 Mouse With Cheese — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

A gray pumpkin got round black ears with pink centers, shiny black eyes, a fuzzy pink nose, buck teeth and wire whiskers, plus a wedge of cheese full of holes. It sat on Main Street in 2013 with ordinary traffic going by behind it.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

😁 Grinning Monster — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Rows of painted teeth run across the full width of the pumpkin, under two green eyes and a tiny red top hat. It weighed 1,150 pounds and sat outside King Eider’s Pub in 2013, and it is the only one here that looks hungry.

💡 Gravity Fact: At the festival’s Pumpkin Drop, a crane lifts two freshly grown local pumpkins more than 160 feet and lets go. They hit the ground at over 60 miles per hour.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

⚙️ “Steampumpkin” — By Minda Gold, Jonah and Jacques Vesery in Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Copper pipes, valves, gears, a coiled wire and a funnel full of small pumpkins turned a giant pumpkin into an engine, with a puff of cotton for steam. Almost none of the pumpkin’s own skin shows. Minda Gold and Jonah and Jacques Vesery built it in front of Fernald’s Country Store at the 2013 festival, and Gold named it “Steampumpkin” after the steampunk style.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🐪 Pyramids and a Camel — Jack O’Lantern Spectacular in Louisville, Kentucky, USA 🇺🇸

Far from Maine, this carving glows on a dark trail: three pyramids, a camel with its rider and a big glowing disk in the sky, cut so thin that the light inside shines through, with smaller jack-o’-lanterns grinning in the dark behind it. Lou Oms photographed it in 2013 at the Jack O’Lantern Spectacular in Louisville’s Iroquois Park.

💡 Glow Fact: The Spectacular has filled its trail with about 5,000 hand-carved pumpkins each fall. In 2026 it left Iroquois Park for Kentucky Kingdom.

📷 Photo: Lou Oms / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🐦 Atlantic Puffin — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

This one is just paint: a black back, a white belly and the blue, yellow and orange beak of a puffin, a seabird that nests on islands off the Maine coast. The pumpkin’s lopsided shape does the rest, and it looks like a puffin that sat down on the sidewalk.

💡 Puffin Fact: In 1973 Audubon’s Project Puffin began bringing chicks from Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock, and puffins nested there again in 1981. About 1,300 pairs now breed on five Maine islands.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🐚 Sea Creatures — Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

No paint here. Fish after fish is carved into the skin, some cut right through to the yellow flesh, so it looks more like old ivory than a pumpkin.

💡 Seed Fact: Howard Dill, who lived near Windsor, Nova Scotia, patented his Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds in 1979, the same year his 199-kilogram (439-pound) pumpkin broke a 76-year-old Canadian record.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🦞 Lobster Purse — By Deb Arter in Damariscotta, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Deb Arter painted this pumpkin in 2015 to look like one of the purses sold by her sponsor, Tori Anna Designs, and gave it a red coat covered in white lobsters. She had already turned earlier pumpkins into teacups, rabbits and candy apples. Her rule: “The pumpkin tells you what it wants to be.” This one wanted to be a handbag.

📷 Photo: Paul VanDerWerf / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

🚣 Pumpkin Boat Regatta — Damariscotta River, Maine, USA 🇺🇸

Three racers paddle away from the dock in hollowed-out pumpkins, one painted yellow and one wrapped in silver foil, while two people are in the water beside them. In the regatta on the Damariscotta River, racers paddle or use motors, and most wear costumes.

💡 Boat Fact: The pumpkin boats weigh 400 to 700 pounds, and the first two raced each other in 2007.

📂 Artwork File · Sourced factsPumpkin Boat RegattaDamariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta · Every October · Damariscotta, MaineGiant pumpkin boatsDamariscotta RiverPaddle and powerboat1Racers paddle or motor hollowed-out giant pumpkins of 400 to 700 pounds, according to the festival.Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta2Races launch from the Damariscotta Harbor Public Landing, in separate paddleboat and powerboat divisions.Portland Press Herald201314 OctRace day preview · Press Herald201512 OctRace report · Bangor Daily News20169 OctBellemare photo · camera date201610 OctHeld in rain · Boothbay Register20179 OctRace report · Press Herald201914 Oct13th annual · WGME202414 OctRace report · WGME202512 OctRace photographed · Press Herald202611 OctRegatta day · WGME202611 OctRace photographed · Lincoln County NewsRead the full file →