The Town of Hamlet is once again getting into the spirit of fall, thanks to the efforts and generosity of the local community. For the past several years, residents have been decorating the town with corn stalks, hay, and pumpkins.
Susie Rowles has spearheaded the effort. “I’ve done it for our house for our family forever,” she explains. “About four or five years ago, I decided I was going to do a couple across the street to make it look nice for the elderly people that we keep an eye on, and it looked so nice, we went ahead and we did a few more. . . . And everybody started saying how much they liked it, so we just started doing it, the last four or five years.”
The annual fall decorating is growing into a community effort. Rowles says Burch and Troike farms have donated the corn for about three years. Others donate hay and pumpkins. Rowles says members of the Cheaper by the Dozen Home Extension club helped make decorative bows with materials provided by the town, and some FFA students helped this year, as well.
She thanks everyone who donated and helped with this year’s decorating, noting that they were able to install almost 90 corn sheaves around Hamlet this year. “It’s a lot of corn to cut,” she adds. “It takes seven or eight loads, and that includes a truck pulling a trailer, so it’s quite a bit of corn. But everybody seems to enjoy it. So it’s our way of giving back to the town.”
Rowles says the decorations will stay up until the day after Thanksgiving, and she’s looking for volunteers to help out next year.
