The Londonderry Calendar Between Old Home Day and First Cider
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
If you have lived here more than a season or two, you already know the shape of late August in Londonderry. The Town Common fills up on a Thursday night, the parade rolls down Mammoth Road on Saturday, and by the following weekend the orchards have flipped their PYO signs from peaches to apples. What you may not have taken stock of is how much thinner that farm map has gotten since last fall, and what it means for the way this six-week window actually plays out in 2026.
This is a walk through that stretch, from the third weekend of August into the first true cider weekend, written for people who already live on this side of Exit 4.
Londonderry is one of only a handful of New Hampshire towns that have kept Old Home Day on the third weekend of August every year since Governor Frank Rollins started the tradition in 1899 to coax former residents back to their hometowns. The 2025 edition ran four days, Wednesday through Saturday, and the 2026 board has been meeting since January to keep the same footprint on the Town Common at 268B Mammoth Road.
The bones of the weekend are the parts locals plan around: live music on the common, food vendors, community organization booths, a parade, and fireworks to close it out. If you have not registered a group in a few years, note the small change the board flagged this year, which is that payment for participants is now invoiced in mid-June rather than collected at signup. Worth a look if your Scout troop or PTA group has drifted off the roster.
The reason this matters beyond nostalgia is that Old Home Day is the last town-wide event before farm traffic takes over the calendar. Once the fireworks are done, the next four weekends belong to the orchards, and the orchards are a different picture than they were a year ago.
Elwood Orchards on Elwood Road, the corn maze farm that generations of Londonderry parents used as their September default, is gone. The family announced the closure on social media in early 2026 and the Union Leader confirmed it: after 115 years, Wayne and Wayland Elwood posted that they had "decided to close Elwood Orchards after 115 years in the business," thanking families for returning each fall to pick apples and take photos in the fields. Sunnycrest Farm, a short drive down the same road, posted a short public response that captured the mood of a lot of long-time residents:
We fight for every inch of soil. The amount of farmers that have gone out of business is astonishing.
Katie Sullivan, an assistant principal at Londonderry High School who grew up in town, put the loss in local terms in the same article: every farm around here had a purpose, and Elwood's was the corn maze. There is no direct replacement for that within town lines this fall.
What is still standing is worth naming out loud, because the remaining farms are going to absorb the crowds that used to spread across four:
If your usual routine was Elwood on the last Saturday of September, this is the year to shift that. Mack's Pick Your Own has twice won the People's Choice award in New Hampshire Magazine's Best of New Hampshire and it shows up in the parking lot on peak weekends. The practical move for residents is a weekday visit or an early morning on Saturday, before the Massachusetts license plates arrive off I-93.
The under-used counterweight to peak orchard weekends is fifteen minutes away on the other side of town. The Musquash Conservation Area is the largest conservation tract in Londonderry, and the Londonderry Trailways group puts the size at roughly 1,000 acres of town-owned land with an extensive marked trail system of 20-plus miles. When you add the 150-acre Musquash Swamp Wildlife Management Area that Fish and Game created in 2017 and the surrounding easements, Town Manager Kevin Smith has described the combined footprint as 1,400 acres, which he called the "crown jewel" of the community.
Four trailheads spread the entry points around town, which is the reason you rarely see the parking situation you get at Mack's on a Saturday:
A few notes only a resident would think to pass on. Hunting is allowed during the fall seasons, so bright orange is not optional once late September arrives. The Londonderry Fish & Game Club has been adjacent to the Musquash since 1951, which means you may hear gunfire from that direction year-round and it is not a reason to turn around. The 2015 town trail map is still the reference document, downloadable as a PDF from the Conservation Commission page, and it works well inside the Avenza Maps app on a phone with no cell service in the interior of the woods. Bring bug spray until the first hard frost, which in this town has historically landed somewhere in the first two weeks of October.
The Musquash is also where the connection to the orchards closes back on itself. Funding for the original trail map was donated by Moose Hill Orchards, which is to say Mack's paid to map the woods that its own conservation easements helped protect. The town has purchased easements to hold that land as green space, including a 23-acre parcel of orchard land along Pillsbury Road, so the working farm and the walking woods are more of a single ecosystem than a lot of residents realize.
The signal that late summer has fully handed off to fall is not the equinox. It is the second weekend of September, when St. Peter's Episcopal Church at 3 Peabody Row runs its Apple Country Artisan Fair. In 2026 that lands Saturday, September 12 from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday, September 13 from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
It is worth putting on the calendar for two reasons that have nothing to do with the crafts themselves. First, it is one of the few local shopping events that is genuinely walkable for a lot of residents on the west side of town, which means the parking situation is easier than the orchards on the same weekend. Second, the fair's timing is a decent local proxy for when the McIntosh come off the trees at Mack's and Sunnycrest, which is the moment cider doughnuts start to actually taste like cider doughnuts. If you have been buying August apples out of storage and wondering why they taste flat, that weekend is the one to reset.
By the last weekend of September the pumpkins are out. Mack's plants roughly 30 acres of them, with fields laid out next to the orchards so you are not driving between two farms to fill one trunk. Between St. Peter's fair and the end of the month, you can put together a Saturday that runs the flea market at Avery Road in the morning, a walk in the Musquash from the Tanager Way trailhead, and a stop at Mack's for cider and a Richardson's cone on the way home, all without leaving a five-mile radius.
Old Home Day, the closing of Elwood, the pressure on the farms that are left, and the quiet expansion of the Musquash are not four separate stories. They are one story about a town that keeps roughly the same August-to-October calendar it has kept for a century, with a smaller supporting cast of farms each decade. The residents who feel most rooted here in the fall of 2026 are going to be the ones who show up at the places that are still open, on the weekdays when they still feel like Londonderry rather than a regional destination.
If you are thinking further out than this season, whether that is a move within town, a sale of a long-held property near one of these farms, or a first look at Londonderry from somewhere else in Southern New Hampshire, Pat Clancey Realty has been working these streets long enough to have opinions worth asking for. Work with us and get a local market consultation built on the same block-by-block knowledge that tells you which trailhead has parking on a Saturday.
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