Why we carve pumpkins, and how they got to Utah
Carved lanterns began in Ireland and Scotland, cut from turnips and beets for Samhain and named for the folk tale of Stingy Jack. Irish emigrants brought the custom to North America in the nineteenth century and switched to the pumpkin, which is native here, far larger, and much easier to carve. Squash itself is not new to Utah: Fremont farmers were growing it across the region more than a thousand years before any of that.
Mountain Pumpkins4 min read
We put pumpkins on porches for a living, so the history is not an idle interest. Almost everything below is somebody else's research, and the sources are listed at the foot of this page.
01The lantern started as a turnip
The carved lantern is older than the pumpkin's part in it. In Ireland and Scotland people hollowed out turnips, beets and mangelwurzels, cut faces into them and set an ember or a candle inside, carrying them at Samhain at the end of the harvest. The name comes from the tale of Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the devil and was refused entry to both heaven and hell, left to wander with a coal inside a hollowed turnip. Jack of the lantern.
Irish and Scottish emigrants brought the custom to North America in the nineteenth century and found something better to carve. The pumpkin is native to the Americas, grows far larger than a turnip, and has a soft interior that a knife goes through easily. Anyone who has tried to hollow a raw turnip understands immediately why the substitution stuck.
02Squash was grown in Utah a thousand years ago
Long before any of that, squash was a Utah crop. From roughly 300 to 1300 CE, the people archaeologists call the Fremont farmed across most of what is now Utah and into Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado, adding corn, beans and squash to a diet that had been hunted and gathered. They irrigated to make it work, in a place that has never given crops away.
Those three crops are the Three Sisters, and they are planted together because they cooperate. Corn gives the beans a trellis. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the corn. The squash spreads low and broad, shading the ground to hold moisture and keep weeds down, and its shallow-rooted neighbours benefit. It is a piece of agricultural engineering that predates the word.
The pumpkin on your porch belongs to a family that has been farmed in this state for something like a thousand years. It is one of the few genuinely local things about an American autumn.
03Cache Valley, and the farm that started it
Pioneer agriculture reached the valley in the mid-nineteenth century and by 1870 nearly every easily irrigated part of Cache Valley was under cultivation, worked with tools that were both simple and scarce. Dry-farming experiments by Joshua Salisbury and George L. Farrell around 1879 and 1880 helped open ground that irrigation could not reach, and the technique took hold across northern Utah through the 1880s. Fruit and vegetables became cash crops rather than subsistence: Cache Valley orchard products worth $3,204 in 1890 were worth $65,432 by 1910 and approached $200,000 by 1920.
The valley's pumpkin tradition is much more recent, and it started with two people. In 1983 Ida and Wallace Beutler set out a simple Halloween display in the field of their family farm on 1600 East in North Logan. Ida, a retired teacher, wanted something positive and family-friendly for Halloween. The first one was a few pumpkins carved into cheerful figures.
1984. Fresh-pressed apple cider and homemade cookies for every visitor, a bonfire by the granary, hand-painted scenes. About 200 people came, across two nights.
1987. Twenty thousand visitors. Four years from a family farm display.
1989. It had outgrown both the farm and what two volunteers could carry. The Beutlers handed it to North Logan City on two conditions: it stays free to the public, and it is never advertised.
1992. Moved to Elk Ridge Park, where it still runs, still free.
The conditions are the part we think about most. A thing that grew from 200 people to 20,000 in three years, and the response was to give it away and refuse to advertise it. That is a particular kind of Cache Valley decision.
04Why the porch display is a recent invention
Carving is old. The uncarved, composed porch display, built from specialty varieties chosen for colour and shape rather than for cutting, is not. It follows the wider availability of heirloom and ornamental cultivars, and it behaves differently: a carved pumpkin gets five to ten days before it collapses, while a whole uncarved one holds for two to three months in Utah's dry autumn. That single fact is why designed displays use uncarved heirlooms, and why they can go up in late September and still look right at Thanksgiving.