Half Moon Bay calls itself the Pumpkin Capital of the World. In the early 1970s the town of Circleville, Ohio challenged the title, and the two towns settled it with a weigh-off over the phone. A former Half Moon Bay mayor later conceded that Circleville’s pumpkin was a little bigger.
A 2004 newspaper piece noted that Half Moon Bay hasn’t always grown the biggest pumpkins, since the world record then was a 1,446-pound Canadian pumpkin, but it has drawn the most attention. Its festival drew an estimated 250,000 visitors that weekend.
Since then Half Moon Bay’s weigh-off champion has grown much heavier, and in 2019 it was named the world’s top weigh-off site.
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