What Happens Around Lake Kolelemook After the Museum Closes
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
The Springfield Historical Society's museum is open today, from one to three in the afternoon, and by the ordinary math of its own calendar this is the last time all year that happens on a Sunday. The building runs on a fixed schedule, weekends only, through Labor Day. Tomorrow the season ends. Yesterday the harvest bake sale folded its tables in front of the Meetinghouse and sold out, as it usually does, by three.
If you judged this town by that calendar alone, you'd assume Springfield's civic life runs on a switch. Loud through July, quiet by September. That assumption gets the mechanism backward, and the clearest proof of it isn't the museum at all. It's a pair of moose.
Every July, Old Home Day draws a crowd around a life-size taxidermy display called Forever Locked, the mounted remains of two bull moose whose antlers became permanently tangled during a rutting fight. The story behind it is local in the strictest sense. In October 2003, an outdoorsman named Ray Deragon was scouting a remote stretch of Gile State Forest, a few miles from the lake, when he caught the smell before he saw the source: two bulls, antlers locked from a battle weeks earlier, both dead where they'd fought. Conservation Officer John Wimsatt documented the scene, and what remained of the entangled rack eventually became the exhibit that now travels the state under the name of a settlement that no longer exists, Fowlertown.
Here's the part most people who've stood in front of that display at Old Home Day don't know. The exhibit doesn't live in Springfield. It spends most of the year on the road, appearing at stops like the Farm, Forest & Garden Expo at the Deerfield Fairgrounds and the Hopkinton State Fair, and it's one of only two known antler-locked-moose displays anywhere in North America. The other pair, found in Maine in 2006, spends its year outside the L.L. Bean flagship store in Freeport rather than touring.
So Old Home Day isn't hosting a fairground curiosity. The Historical Society's own event listing puts it plainly: the display "returns home" for that one weekend, back to the town where the moose actually died. Everywhere else on its circuit, it's an exhibit. In Springfield, for two days in July, it's a homecoming. That distinction matters if you live here, because it means the town's best-known summer draw isn't really a summer institution at all. It's a single annual visit inside a much longer, quieter year that the town runs on its own.
That longer year is where the real pattern shows up. The Springfield Historical Society doesn't stop programming when the museum's weekend hours end. Its calendar keeps going: an Annual Meeting, Potluck Supper, and Oral History Premiere on October 17, and a Sip-a-Soup and Puzzle Swap at the Meetinghouse on November 7. Neither of those draws the kind of turnout Old Home Day does. Both happen anyway, run by the same volunteer structure that staffed the bake sale tables and kept the museum open on summer weekends.
Look earlier in the year and the same organization is already at work well before the July crowd arrives. It runs an eighth annual Rubber Ducky Race at Twin Lake Village Golf Course each April, and in late May it organizes a week-long cemetery restoration project followed by a gravestone cleaning party paired with a pulled pork dinner. None of that is aimed at visitors. It's maintenance, in the literal sense, done by people who live here and would be doing it whether or not anyone from outside town ever heard of Forever Locked.
What that adds up to is a civic calendar that doesn't actually have an off-season. It has a public season and a smaller one, run by the same hands.
The same structure governs the lake itself. The Kolelemook Lake Protective Association held its annual meeting this year on July 18 in the Protectworth Room at the Town Office, and the board that runs it year-round has names attached: Steve Dolan as president, Lou Senatore as treasurer, Barbara Cooper as secretary, alongside members Jerry Cooper, Phil DeConinck, Lori DeConinck, Danielle Dulchinos, and Jim Clancy. That meeting is where the group sets its programs for the rest of the year, including Lake Host, LakeSmart, water sampling, and weed watching, the unglamorous work that keeps the water clear enough to swim in by August.
The thing worth understanding if you live on or near this lake is that the meeting in July isn't a ceremony. It's the decision point. Whatever gets assigned in that room in mid-July is what actually happens to the shoreline and the water quality for the following eleven months, long after the swimmers who benefit from it have gone back to wherever they came from. The Kolelemook Lake Protective Association doesn't take a season off any more than the Historical Society does. It just moves from a public annual meeting to the quieter work of sampling and monitoring that nobody sees unless they go looking for it.
For anyone keeping track of the rest of 2026 around the lake, the town's own listings put a few concrete dates ahead:
None of these will draw the crowd Old Home Day does. That's the point. The Town of Springfield's own event postings treat a yard sale and a lake association's annual meeting with the same procedural plainness as any other town business, because to the people running them, they are the same kind of work. Public in July, smaller in November, but never actually paused.
If there's one thing worth knowing about Springfield that the July crowd doesn't get around a table of moose antlers or a bake sale, it's this: the quiet that settles in after Labor Day isn't the town closing up. It's the same organizations, the same named volunteers, doing the version of their work that doesn't need an audience. The lake gets sampled whether or not anyone's watching. The cemetery gets restored whether or not it makes the calendar highlight reel. The moose comes home for two days and then goes back on the road, and everything that actually keeps this place running continues without it.
That's the kind of detail that only shows up when you've watched a place across its full year rather than just its loudest weekend, and it's the same instinct Pamela Perkins brings to reading a lake, a shoreline, or a piece of land here. Understanding a place means understanding what it does when nobody's counting attendance.
If you're thinking about property on Lake Kolelemook or anywhere else in the Lake Sunapee region, Pamela Perkins brings that same year-round read on these towns to every conversation. Get in Touch.
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