Grimshaw Park at Fort Phoenix spent Saturday, September 19 looking like a different century. Swords & Sails: A Seaport Medieval Faire filled the waterfront with knights, artisans, and hands-on crafts from 11 in the morning until 10 at night, free to walk into, the kind of event Fairhaven has hosted often enough that most residents probably didn't think twice about who made it happen. This year, that question is worth asking. The town office that booked the park, coordinated the vendors, and handled the insurance paperwork for that faire closed for good this summer.
The Office of Tourism, Community & Economic Development, known around town as Discover Fairhaven, was eliminated effective July 1, 2026, a result of this year's town election. After more than three decades running the events most residents associate with Fairhaven's calendar, the office is gone, and its own website now says the events list will stay online only as a historical reference through the end of the year. No successor office has been named.
The office behind the costumes
Discover Fairhaven didn't just post flyers. It built and ran the town's signature events for over 30 years: Swords & Sails, the Huttleston Marketplace that grew into Huttleston HarborFest, and the Olde-Tyme Holiday Village, now in its 28th year and still scheduled for December 12. It partnered with groups like the Fairhaven Village Militia, the regional planning agency SRPEDD, and BayCoast Bank on events like this year's MA250 "Harbor of Courage" commemoration at Fort Phoenix, which brought a Revolutionary War encampment, cannon fire, and a ten-gun salute to the same waterfront where Swords & Sails later set up its tents.
That kind of work runs on relationships built over years: the vendor contacts, the town permits, the insurance carriers who already know the site. None of that transfers automatically just because a parade still needs to happen.
What the closure means this year, and next
The events already booked for 2026 are still on. Swords & Sails already ran. Olde-Tyme Holiday Village is still set for December 12. But the town's own notice draws a clear line: the calendar itself won't be maintained past this year, and nobody has been assigned to plan 2027's version of these events. If you've assumed Fairhaven's fall lineup simply repeats itself every year without anyone actively deciding it should, that assumption no longer holds for the events that came out of this particular office.
The parade that never needed a town office
Not every fall tradition in Fairhaven depends on a town department, and the contrast is instructive. The North Fairhaven Improvement Association has run its Halloween Horribles Parade since 1950. It's a membership organization that meets the fourth Thursday of every month at 267 Adams Street, and it funds the parade itself, through donors it has cultivated over decades, not a line item in a town budget.
In 2024, NFIA moved the entire event inside Livesey Park instead of marching down Main Street to St. Mary's Church, and shifted it to a Saturday to build in a rain date after getting rained out the year before with, by their own account, thousands of pieces of candy left with nowhere to go. Last year's parade at Livesey Park drew several hundred costumed marchers, and NFIA president Andrew Romano publicly thanked the community donors who covered the candy, hot chocolate, lighting, and security that kept the event completely free. That's a neighborhood association running its own fundraising and its own event planning, year after year, independent of whatever happens at town hall.
This year's Halloween Horribles Parade is scheduled for Saturday, October 24, from 5 to 7 p.m., again at Livesey Park.
The rest of the fall calendar
Here's what's left on the books for Fairhaven this season, along with a sense of which events run on town-office infrastructure and which run on neighborhood volunteer hours:
- October 24 — NFIA Halloween Horribles Parade, Livesey Park, 5 to 7 p.m. Volunteer-organized by the North Fairhaven Improvement Association.
- November 11 — Fairhaven's Veterans Day Parade, starting at Fairhaven High School, 9 a.m.
- November 26 — Fairhaven Turkey Trot, SMEC at 56 Bridge Street, 8 a.m.
- December 4 — NFIA's Benoit Square Lighting & Sing-Along, Benoit Square, 6:30 p.m. Another NFIA event.
- December 12 — 28th Annual Olde-Tyme Holiday Village, a Discover Fairhaven signature event and, as of now, the last one confirmed under that name.
Two of the five events on this list belong to a volunteer association with a 76-year track record. One belongs to an office that no longer exists. The other two are long-running town traditions that don't appear to have depended on Discover Fairhaven's staff to happen, though exactly who handles logistics for the Veterans Day Parade and the Turkey Trot going forward isn't something the public record answers yet.
If you want next year's calendar to look the same
The pattern here isn't complicated once you see it. The events that have survived town budget decisions for decades are the ones a neighborhood group already treats as its own responsibility, fundraising for candy and hot chocolate one donor at a time, holding monthly meetings, adjusting the format when the weather doesn't cooperate. The events built by a government office are only as durable as that office's budget line, and Fairhaven just found out what happens when that line disappears.
If Swords & Sails or the Holiday Village matter to you, next year is the point where someone has to decide to keep them going. That might be a new town committee, a nonprofit, or an existing group like NFIA taking on more than it currently does. NFIA meets the fourth Thursday of every month at 267 Adams Street, and its Facebook page and website list current meeting information for anyone curious about how a Fairhaven tradition actually gets funded and run.
None of this changes what makes Fairhaven worth living in this fall. The harbor still turned into a medieval village for a day. The parade still fills Livesey Park with a few hundred costumes at the end of October. But paying attention to who's actually keeping these things running tells you something about how the town works that the calendar alone never will.
If watching how a place holds onto its traditions has you thinking about what your own Fairhaven home is worth in a town that clearly still shows up for itself, Martin Real Estate has spent years working these same streets and can put together a free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.
