Sabrina Beach, of New Harbor, stands in the kitchen of her home on Tuesday, April 22. Beach is coordinating this year’s Olde Bristol Days celebration and is looking for volunteers, business sponsorships, and food trucks interested in being a part of the event. (Johnathan Riley photo)
After a few months of uncertainty surrounding how the historic festivities will look, it appears Olde Bristol Days will continue this summer in its full scope Aug. 9-10.
Sabrina Beach, of New Harbor, has stepped up to organize the two-day event after learning that the parade and daytime festivities had been removed due to organizational difficulties.
“I heard that they wanted to do away with (some events),” Beach said. “It upset me, and the parades are so much fun, and I thought, maybe I need to get involved.”
Olde Bristol Days is a historic townwide celebration that marked its 70th anniversary last summer. The event has evolved over the years, with its most recent iteration including a parade, daytime craft vendors, fair games, a water slide, an antique car show, fireworks, music, and lobster boat races.
Each of the events was organized separately, according to Bristol Town Administrator Rachel Bizarro, she said at a Jan. 8 select board meeting the event had been harder to manage since daytime festivities like craft vendors, fair games, and the water slide moved in 2021 from the state-owned Fort William Henry, where it had been held for most of its history, to town-owned Pemaquid Beach Park.
Several solutions to handle the event were suggested at the Jan. 8 meeting, including hiring a full-time coordinator to communicate between volunteers and the event’s disparate parts. Ultimately, the select board made the decision to reduce the scope of the festivities to make Olde Bristol Days more manageable, leaving only the nighttime fireworks and music.
Beach, who announced her intentions to help oversee the event in March, said she’s already met with event coordinators and found volunteers to organize the parades.
“I think that’s what the town said that they needed the most was just someone to kind of oversee,” she said. “Gather the organizers, gather the volunteers, gather the people to head up each event and then do some sponsorship work and promotional so that’s where I’m at right now, because I was able to find some great people to head up each of the events.”
Bizarro said Beach is the right person to do (the job), and she brings a lot of enthusiasm and understands the dynamics of the town.
If you’re going to have anyone do it, she’s the one, Bizarro said.
Paul Leeman Jr. leads a group of children on the Olde Bristol Days parade route through Bristol in August 2024. After a select board meeting in January where cutting events like the parade were discussed, Sabrina Beach, of New Harbor, stepped up to coordinate the festival. (Johnathan Riley photo, LCN file)
While many events will remain the same, some will look a little different, according to Beach.
After a meeting with Bristol Parks Commissioners on Tuesday, April 22, it was decided to hold the fairground events, including craft vendors, fair games, and possibly the water slide on the baseball diamond down at Pemaquid Beach Park.
Last year, the events were held in the grassy areas beyond the park’s ticket booth, which meant the park needed to forgo charging admissions, which was a financial drawback for the department.
Beach tried to open up the possibility of returning the event to Fort William Henry, but an employee with the Bureau of Parks and Lands said “it wasn’t going to happen,” she said.
However, Beach said it is possible there could be an event down at the fort. While the bureau declined to host the whole festival there, the employee was open to the idea of hosting historic reenactors, an idea Beach pitched.
Beach said she’d also like to get food trucks around town and not just at the beach, to create a more cohesive fair-like experience around the peninsula.
In organizing the parade and fairground booths, Beach said she’d like to keep politics out of the experience for attendees by not including any political floats or booths for the event.
“I just feel like we need to just celebrate this town and get away from politics and have something that everybody can enjoy,” she said. “I am hoping that that doesn’t rub people the wrong way, because I’m saying none. I’m not saying one party over the other. I’m just saying, yeah, let’s get away from it for a while. Let’s have fun as a town and get away from the politics.”
Olde Bristol Days is special to Beach for many reasons, but part of what spurred her to organize was to do it in memory of her late husband, John Beach, who died in 2023 and loved the festival.
“After I got through the first year and a half after my husband died and was not able to do anything, I thought, well, this is time for me to get involved in my community and do some fun stuff,” she said. “I guess in some ways, it is a memorial to my husband. I think he would think it was pretty cool that I’m doing this … he’d think I was nuts, but he’d think it was pretty cool.”
Beach is still looking for volunteers to help with parking and trash cleanup, and business sponsorships for events and food trucks interested in being involved. Anyone interested in either should email her at oldebristoldays25@gmail.com and follow the Olde Bristol Days Facebook page for updates.
