Tuesday morning, September 8, the wind coming off the Merrimack was cool enough that the Exchange Club of Greater Newburyport worked in jackets while they planted flags along Bartlet Mall. Department of Public Services crews helped set the poles. By mid-afternoon the field was full. "It's a beautiful sight," Exchange Club member Steve Di Camillo told the Daily News as the last rows went in.
That sentence gets said most years. The Field of Honor has stood on Bartlet Mall every September since 2010, and by now the routine is familiar to anyone who walks past on their way downtown: flags go up, the town pauses, flags come down. What's different in 2026 is the math. This is the 17th Field of Honor, but it's also the 25th anniversary of September 11, the year the country marks its 250th birthday, and the 50th year the Exchange Club itself has existed in Newburyport, having formed here in 1976. Three separate clocks, all landing on the same September.
Three Anniversaries, One Field
The Exchange Club doesn't usually make a point of its own age. Its mission runs toward child abuse prevention, Americanism, youth programs, and general community service, and the Field of Honor is the one fundraiser that pays for all of it. Most years the story is the flags themselves, the same somber tradition it's been for over a decade and a half.
This year the club has said, plainly, that it's leaning harder into the occasion, hoping to make 2026's version bigger than last year's. That's a reasonable instinct. A club doesn't get a founding-year anniversary that lines up with a national quarter-millennial and a 9/11 milestone very often, and the Exchange Club seems to know it. The flags planted this week aren't just marking the attacks. They're standing in for a club that has quietly run Newburyport's Americanism programming since before most of the businesses on State Street existed in their current form.
The Week Itself
The display went up Tuesday, September 8, and comes down Tuesday, September 15. In between, the Exchange Club held its Dedication Ceremony on Sunday, September 13, from noon to 1:30 p.m., right on Bartlet Mall at 153 Auburn Street. The ceremony is open to anyone who wants to attend, no ticket, no membership required. Anyone who walked the Mall this week saw the same view: hundreds of flags in rows, honoring veterans, active service members, police and fire personnel, health care workers, and what the club calls personal heroes, meaning anyone who's put someone else's needs ahead of their own without being asked.
By the time you read this, if it's after the 15th, the poles are already coming out of the ground. That's the nature of the Field of Honor. It's designed to be temporary. The point isn't permanence, it's the week itself, the ceremony, the walk past it on your way to Market Square.
Then the Calendar Turns
Here's the part that doesn't usually get said out loud, but it's true every year and especially true in 2026: the same eleven days it takes the flags to come down and the town to catch its breath are the same eleven days before Newburyport pivots into its harvest-season run of festivals. The Field of Honor closes September 15. Oysterfest opens on the Tannery parking lot September 26. In between, three more events fill the calendar, all within a mile or two of Bartlet Mall.
- PlumFest, Saturday, September 12, noon to 6 p.m., free, spread across Plum Island. Bands play at stops all over the island, and organizers run free shuttle buses from the Plum Island Airport so nobody has to hunt for parking near the venues. Proceeds this year benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Lower Merrimack Valley.
- Chuckapalooza 4, Saturday, September 19, at Newburyport Brewing Company, starting at noon.
- Oysterfest In The Port, Saturday, September 26, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Tannery Marketplace on Water Street. Newburyport FISH hosts more than 20 oyster farms and vendors from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, shucking oysters harvested that same morning. Riverwalk Brewing pours the beer, 90+ Cellars pours the wine, and every shell shucked gets donated to the Mass Oyster Project to help restore local reefs.
- The Portrun Half Marathon, Sunday, September 27, starting at 8 a.m. from Riverwalk Brewing on Parker Street, with a 5K starting fifteen minutes later.
- The Newburyport Chocolate Tour, Saturday, October 3, noon to 4 p.m., which this year adds something new: the first-ever Chocolate Market at the Tannery, alongside the tour's usual stops through downtown shops.
None of these events is secret. Anyone who's lived here a few Septembers knows Oysterfest sells out fast and that Chuckapalooza fills the brewery's lot by early afternoon. What's easy to miss, because each event gets covered on its own, is how close together they all sit on the calendar and how close together they sit on the map. Bartlet Mall, the Tannery, the brewery on Parker Street, Plum Island. None of it is more than a short drive apart, and most of it is walkable if you're downtown to begin with.
What That Adjacency Actually Says
It's easy to write two paragraphs, one about the Field of Honor and one about oyster season, and call it a September roundup. But the flags and the oyster shells aren't unrelated facts sitting next to each other on a calendar. They're the same civic muscle, used two different ways, inside the same three weeks.
The Field of Honor asks the town to stand still for a few days. Oysterfest, PlumFest, Chuckapalooza, the Portrun, and the Chocolate Tour ask it to show up and spend money that goes back into local causes, whether that's the Boys and Girls Club, the Mass Oyster Project, or the Exchange Club's own youth and Americanism work. Both registers run through the same handful of blocks, often the same volunteers, often the same sponsors. A town this size doesn't have separate infrastructure for solemn weeks and festive weeks. It has one civic calendar, and this particular September happens to stack both registers back to back, with eleven days between the last flag coming down and the first oyster getting shucked.
That's not something a portal listing or a national trend piece would ever surface. It shows up only if you're paying attention to what's actually on Bartlet Mall this week, and what's scheduled for the Tannery lot eleven days later.
If you're the kind of neighbor who already has the Chocolate Tour circled for October 3, you already know this rhythm. If you're newer to town and wondering why everyone keeps mentioning both a flag ceremony and an oyster festival in the same breath, now you know why. It's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's just what late September looks like here.
Kevin Fruh and his team have spent enough Septembers in Newburyport to know the difference between the town's quiet weeks and its loud ones, and they're always glad to point neighbors toward whatever's next on the calendar, whether that's the next Field of Honor or the next open house down the street.
