Walk the grounds at 27 Bow Street this Saturday and you will see a newly built structure on the historic Putnam House grounds. The North Reading Historical and Antiquarian Society holds its 32nd Annual Apple Festival on the Putnam House lawn from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., free admission, and among the tents and pony rides sits the newest building the town has added to its historic core in years. It came from volunteers with lumber and a Saturday to spare.
Over the past decade, North Reading has studied options for its commercial spine along Route 28, while volunteers completed a museum on the Putnam House grounds.
The Apple Festival started in 1995. It has run every September since, and the Historical Society treats it as its largest single fundraiser of the year, the money going straight into maintaining the 1720 Putnam House and the cluster of buildings around it.
The town's Main Street planning effort received a formal push through the 2015 Massachusetts Downtown Initiative grant, followed by a Metropolitan Area Planning Council master plan process that ran through 2018 and was later revised for a 2020-2030 horizon. That plan called for transforming Route 28 into a walkable village center through a sequence of three linked moves: rezoning, sewer investment, and streetscape redesign. Nearly a decade later, the MAPC's own plan document describes those three moves as recommendations.
The Apple Festival keeps happening. Thirty-two years and counting, funded almost entirely by $20 crafter registration fees, a 50/50 raffle, and an apple pie contest.
The Putnam House grounds bring together buildings from several periods. Here's what visitors can walk through this weekend, listed by the century they were built in:
The Minutemen's work on the grounds extends beyond the museum.
The Putnam House grounds also feature the restored Van Laethem Farm windmill, an artifact rescued back in 1986 by resident Mark Hall when the Ridgeway Estates subdivision went up off Winter Street. That windmill sat in pieces for years before the Minutemen took on a restoration that stretched past three years. It was formally dedicated on the Putnam House grounds at last year's Apple Festival, and that single day of pie sales, raffle tickets, and vendor fees raised more than $4,000, money the Society has earmarked for a permanent history exhibit on the second floor of the Putnam House itself, according to the Local Headline News account of the dedication.
If you want proof this event is built for the people who already live here and not for anyone passing through, look at the rules for the Classic Apple Pie Contest. According to the Historical Society's own event page, entry is open to North Reading residents only, split into two age brackets: youth entrants between 12 and 17, adults 18 and up. There's no pre-registration. You show up, you drop off your pie between 8 and 10 a.m. the morning of, and a panel does a blind tasting starting at 11.
The rules get specific fast. Pies must be made from scratch with both a top and bottom crust, no crumb toppings allowed. No nuts, raisins, cranberries, or other fruit mixed in, this is a straight apple pie competition and the judges are tasting for that alone. Lattice work and decorative crust cutouts are fair game if you want to get fancy, but the substance underneath has to hold up on its own. Winners get announced and ribboned by noon, and the losing entries get sold off by the slice with a scoop of ice cream on top.
It is a small, specific, slightly stubborn tradition that has lasted 32 years.
One example is North Reading Landing. In June 2026, Atlantic Capital Partners sold North Reading Landing, the 70,747-square-foot former Stop & Shop site directly on Route 28, for $7.3 million. The property still carries a short-term lease to Ocean State Job Lot, and the brokerage that handled the sale described the site in its own release as giving the new owner "an ideal runway to reimagine the site." The full terms of that sale are covered by Boston Real Estate Times, including the detail that Route 28 at that stretch carries more than 19,000 vehicles a day, plenty of traffic for whatever eventually replaces the current tenant.
North Reading's Main Street planning has included studies and proposals. The town's Housing Production Plan draft cleared the Community Planning Commission back in 2018 and still needed state certification after that. A feasibility study for shared wastewater infrastructure near the Main Street and Winter Street intersection, done with Abacus Architects, was produced as a planning document.
Other recent projects include work at a smaller scale. A new Domino's opened at 265 Main Street this past March, an open pizza-theater setup where you can watch your order get made, and the franchise owner told the Reading Observer he was hiring for 20 positions right out of the gate. And this past August, the town's Department of Public Works began the North Street and Lowell Road paving project, adding new curbing and sidewalk from Town Hall to Lowell Road. The town had expected final paving in mid-September after the required curing period.
None of this requires advance planning. Show up to the Putnam House grounds anytime between 10 and 3, wander through more than 50 crafter and vendor booths, take the free tours through buildings spanning three centuries, and grab a slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream once the contest results are in around noon. Bring cash for the raffle. If you've got a family recipe worth entering, get it to the Putnam House between 8 and 10 that morning, and remember: no crumb crust, no cranberries, and you'd better actually live in town.
The Apple Festival offers a chance to explore the Putnam House grounds and North Reading's history.
If you're a longtime North Reading resident who's ever wondered what your own piece of this history is worth, the Nikki Martin Team offers a Free Home Valuation whenever you're curious. But this Saturday, the only valuation that matters is whose pie takes the ribbon.
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