We’re so excited to announce that we’ve partnered with
Punkintown Place to host our Second Annual Boo Tour!
It’s just fantastic when we’re able to pair up with local businesses and people – and this partnership is no exception!
This brand new “plaza” is hiding in plain sight – right across from Marshwood High School!
We’ve been looking for a place to be able to host the traffic this event draws, as some of you may remember the strange occurrence of having two traffic jams in South Berwick in 2020… Yeah, we’re talking Halloween night, and a second one in December. Oops. That was totally us! Needless to say, we weren’t gonna let a little traffic get in our way of giving kids, families & friends the opportunity to participate in a fun holiday event!
Covid-19 has hit a lot of us pretty hard, although Maine has a pretty good record of keeping most of its residents healthy. We think it stems from the fact that within our communities, we make a real effort to make sure our neighbors are ok. We absolutely take the health of our community into consideration, but we also want to try and provide the social interaction which this virus has basically wiped out for many of us.
So dress in your best costumes and join us for a wicked fun self-guided tour of some of SoBo’s spookiest decorated homes for Halloween!
We will be kicking off by meeting here, at Punkintown Plaza
4:30pm EST on October 30th
Kicking off, we’ll gather outside in the parking lot to say hello and Happy Halloween!
It is up to you whether you want to do this as a drive-through and keep contact to a minimum, or to stay a few minutes, socialize and enjoy some company while snapping a couple pictures in our “Selfie Booth”.
You’ll collect a goodie-bag as a participation thank you from us, the members of Allen Realty Group, and we’ll provide you with a printed overview of the route as well as a list to keep track of your favorite houses.
We can’t wait to see you there!
Don’t have your tickets yet?! What are you waiting for?!
Punkintown History – briefly!
Most people think Punkintown is just a cute name – but let us tell you a little bit about the history of this fascinating little village tucked away in our neighborhood. While the original settlement no longer exists, there are still remnants to be found if you know where to look.
Punkintown sits amongst the South Berwick, Eliot, and York border in Maine, and was once an independent little settlement of it’s own. It enjoyed success with both milling their own grains, and quarrying the abundant landscape, as mills popped up on the banks of rivers to harness hydro-power. At its peak success, between seven and ten families called this area their home, and about 40 residents were settled in.
The majority of old Punkintown road is no longer in use, other than a roughly 1,000′ span remaining in South Berwick today. While there isn’t much of the village left other than some very old foundations and family cemeteries, the hike through the area is worth it to find these hidden histories. Eliot preserved a larger stretch of Punkintown Road, about 3,400ft, and it’s now home to about a dozen families.
The Great Works Regional Land Trust owns a significant portion of the former village, which is pretty great considering it will be kept as natural landscape. GWRLT also helped the Town of Eliot to purchase part of the land from the estate of Frank Parsons, whom owned all of the land at the time. It’s now part of “Eliot Town Forest”.
This little village thrived for a while, until a series of misfortunes hit. This included mills shutting down in favor of newer technologies offering jobs elsewhere, a forest fire in 1916 which destroyed a few homes, a tuberculosis outbreak in 1922 and then another fire which claimed the last of the buildings later that year.
One of the last known residents, reported to wander through South Berwick up until the 1960’s, was Emma-Jane Payne, who was notorious for selling locals fresh produce… from their own gardens! She also had the misfortune of having quite a nickname which we’ll let you discover, should you be interested.
So that’s just a little local history of Punkintown for today.
Doesn’t it make you want to take a walk in the woods to see what you can find?!