Anoka Halloween
There’s a gentle, unassuming nature to the city of Anoka. Its downtown area is quaint, its red brick buildings stand stoically, its streets are spotted with old trees that canopy houses and businesses. The small city is a modest home to 18,000 citizens.
But despite all of its modesty, the central Minnesota city is also home to many stories, and this one begins with some 101-year-old Halloween anarchy.
Long before kiddies dressed up in their Halloween best and scampered from house to house for giant Snickers bars, Anoka county was rampant with tyrannical children and their Halloween hoaxes.
In the beginning of the 20th century, the country had a Halloween antics issue. When Scottish and Irish immigrants immigrated to the United States, they brought their Halloween traditions across the Atlantic too. Those traditions included oodles and oodles of pranks, from carving scary faces into turnips, scaring away travelers, to decorating an Ohio minister’s front yard with beer signs and a keg pyramid. Some pranks and Halloween behavior became so volatile that cities almost banned the holiday.
Minnesota was not lost on the hijinks. On Halloween night in Anoka, children led cows to Main Street where they roamed the downtown area (one even ended up in the county jail), kids soaped windows, tipped outhouses, and managed to put a horseless carriage on the Anoka County High School rooftop—true anarchy. Anokans would wake up every November 1 to witness the destruction done to their town by little ones.
By 1920, the township was sick of the seasonal tricks and eager to ideate a plan to curb the chaos. Enter: a Halloween celebration. George Green, a local businessman, came up with the idea to create festivities that would divert the anarchist children from tipping over cows or soaping Main Street storefronts.
The celebrational activities bear differences from the trunk-or-treats held at churches or the Hocus Pocus and Halloweentown marathons celebrated on Halloween today. Take Anoka’s chicken catch, for example: Six live chickens were unleashed into a crowd and six lucky winners took them home. “We don’t know if the chickens enjoyed the sport,” a 1920 Anoka County Union reads, “but the crowd did.”
Business owners decorated their storefronts on Main Street, and the winners of the decorating contest received not money, not coupons for a caramel apple or pumpkin pie, but gasoline as their prize. The town held a big parade and the Anoka County Union documented 500 costumed Anokans flocking the streets amidst clouds of confetti and paper streamers. One reporter likened the celebration to the sights of New Orlean during Mardi Gras. The children were too busy enjoying their time to perform elaborate pranks. After the celebration ended, Anoka woke up to an unscathed town the next day. Their Halloween diversion prevailed.
The following year, the celebration continued. “We’ve tried a community Halloween tonight for the second time,” Henry Veidt, the man behind Henry Veidt Bottling Works, told the Anoka Herald in 1921. “Last year it was a success. This year, it is even greater. I don’t think there’s a possible doubt but that Anoka will celebrate next Halloween the same way—only more so.”
Veidt was on to something. Each year after 1920—with the exception of 1942 and 1943 when World War II efforts caused Anokans to cancel the festival— the little seed of the original celebration grew in size and scale like a giant pumpkin, welcoming more folks into the small town for a community celebration of the season and earning its name as the Halloween capital of Minnesota, then, the country, and soon the world.
By 1937, Anoka became nationally recognized as a Halloween destination when 12-year-old Harold Blair won a trip to Washington D.C., and brought with him a sweater sewn with an Anoka the Halloween patch on it and a proclamation that named Anoka as the Halloween Capital of the World. By the 1950’s, Hollywood celebrities— Smiley Burnett, Rex Allen, Tex Ritter— would fly into town to see the Halloween Capital of the World for themselves and be the grand marshall of the Halloween parade.
While the official title has fomented disputes about which U.S. city was the first to celebrate Halloween, one thing is crystal clear: Anoka takes Halloween very seriously. With a month-long schedule of events throughout October and devout Halloween lovers who visit during fall, the affinity for the scariest holiday of all stands strong.
John Jost, a longtime resident of Anoka and a self-declared Halloween enthusiast, remembers his early years celebrating Halloween in Anoka: finishing up the school day early to march with his classmates in the Big Parade of Little People, Anoka’s parade for local school children to walk the streets in costume; returning to class to snack on popcorn balls and candy; traveling the Anoka streets for trick-or-treating when he was a tot; and creating a haunted yard for trick-or-treaters with his high school pals once he outgrew the activity. “I would say that I start feeling Halloween in August,” Jost says. “I definitely get the house ready in September, you know, and keep going all through October.”
In 1999, Jost moved to Ohio for a summer and soon returned to Minnesota. Being in a place that didn’t glorify the holiday, according to Jost, was strange. He brings up a quote by George Harrison on what it was like to be a Beatle—”Once you’ve been a Beatle, you’re never really out of it.” The same goes for being an Anokan during Halloween, Jost says. “It's just kind of ingrained into who you are as you grow up in Anoka.”
Anokans and visitors can take part in the abundance of activities leading up to Halloween this year— the Orange Tie Ball, the many parades, the Pumpkin Bowl, the house-decorating contest, and more. Don’t skip out on driving the pumpkin roundabout or visiting the official Anoka Halloween store.
“You have Christmas, you have Thanksgiving, you have Easter,” Jost says, “but Halloween stands alone as Halloween. I mean, that's how big of a deal it is here.” Don’t believe him? Make your way to Anoka to see the Halloween Capital of the World for yourself.
