30 Years of Pumpkins – Art and Tradition

On Oct. 25, 1993, John Bradley gave his mother, Fran Patchin Bradley, a birthday gift of 40 pumpkins. He knew her oft-told story of carving pumpkins with a group of friends in Annandale who placed the jack-o-lanterns on a nearby bridge, and he thought, what better gift? 

The elements were all in place. There was the picturesque bridge at Patchin’s Mill near where they lived, John Bradley had supplied pumpkins and, thus, Fran Bradley launched a Pine Plains Halloween tradition. In the first year, friends and family carved the jack-o-lanterns, positioned them along the bridge at the far northern end of North Main Street, and Fran Bradley lit them with candle stubs from the Pine Plains United Methodist Church. 

Over the years, the number of pumpkins grew. Close to 200 lanterns with glowing eyes sat on the bridge in 2009, the year Fran Bradley died. John Bradley picked up his mother’s project, and has carried it on ever since. This year, its 30^th, Bradley bought 261 pumpkins, setting up an assembly line in the work space beside his house. Friends gathered to precisely cut the tops and clean out the seeds and pulp, preparing the fruits for the communal creations. As he has each year, Bradley invites people to pick up a pumpkin and carve it into a piece of art, scary or not, for the display. The pumpkins are lit for three nights, beginning on Halloween. 

There was a one-year gap when the bridge was closed for replacement. Another year, the Sisco family, who live on the hill on the south side of the bridge and who have helped carve and light pumpkins for many years, took on the project when Bradley was away from the area. 

Other than those two years, the talented Bradley has been responsible for the event. He is a carpenter by profession, though he says he has given up the stair work he did for years, and now has years of practice honing his pumpkin-carving skills. He says these require that the pumpkin be hollowed out to a more delicate thickness, so that the whole pumpkin will glow. Stan Hirson’s  2012 Pine Plains View gives you a glimpse of the 3D designs Bradley sculpts. There is also a Facebook page for the annual event.

When Halloween is over, and trick-or-treaters have put away their costumes, and decorations are taken down, Bradley offers the softening pumpkins to gardeners and farmers for their pigs, and tosses a few on the hillside behind the reclaimed one-room schoolhouse that is his home on Hoffman Road. Squirrels love them and Bradley gets volunteer plants, producing pumpkins of shapes not always conducive to carving into jack-o-lanterns.

So, when the next October comes around, Bradley goes out and buys plump, orange pumpkins, and a Pine Plains custom endures.