Sunday, September 7, 2025

The U.S. town with a pumpkin-based economy

How one small town in Illinois survived the Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline to become the world’s canned pumpkin hotspot.

BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW

Pumpkin season in Morton, Illinois, is serious business. Every year, during the first week of September, the town transforms.

A walk down Main Street reveals pumpkin-themed shop windows. Residents turn out in pumpkin clothing to celebrate the pumpkin parade that winds its way through the village. Businesses offer pumpkin-dog-treat-baking classes and shirts reading “gourd vibes only” for purchase. Stalls selling pumpkin chili, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin pie, and pumpkin ice cream line the carnival grounds. The smell of 50k pumpkin donuts drifts down the street.

Despite challenges from towns in California and Texas, Morton, pop. ~18k, has maintained a stronghold on its title of the world’s pumpkin capital. “I’m sure those are nice people, but they’re wrong,” says Morton pumpkin farmer John Ackerman. “Horribly, horribly wrong.”

This year, the town is celebrating 100 years of the Libby’s pumpkin canning factory in Morton. The factory is a throwback to a pre-Rust Belt America, providing ~200 jobs, endless pride, and a stimulus that benefits the rest of the local economy.

Libby’s processes ~85% of the world’s canned pumpkin, lining grocery store shelves like this one. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

At a time when manufacturing has migrated south and overseas from the Midwest, how has a sleepy village outside of Peoria, Illinois, maintained its prosperity? By going all in on pumpkins.

Carnival grounds

Bridget Wood remembers taking a deep breath and walking out onto a stage to sing “On The Good Ship Lollipop.” Dressed as Shirley Temple, Wood’s rendition won her the coveted title at the 2005 Pumpkin Princess Pageant.

“My family loves to joke with me about that,” she says.

The born-and-raised Mortonite now works as one of four people who pull off the town’s pumpkin festival. She can’t remember a year of her life when she didn’t attend.

“We do a vine cutting, where the parade marshals will cut the vine,” she says. “That’s our opening to all the pumpkin festival grounds.”

She’s watched as the pumpkin, and its ensuing festival, have come to define the town. Planning for the theme (this year is Pumpkin Party of the Century) starts the previous October. There are 1.5k volunteers to corral and judges to assign to the pageant, to the Main Street window contest, to the pumpkin pie eating contest that sees 18 adults wearing garbage bags compete to see who can eat the most pumpkin pie (no hands allowed) in two minutes flat.

(When the pandemic shut down the festival, they ran the pie eating contest online. Last year, a professional eater from Chicago took home the trophy.)

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Wood says the town welcomed 118k people to the festival in 2024 — 7x the population of the town itself. It’s become something of a virtuous cycle for the community.

“Pumpkins are what brought the pumpkin festival, and the pumpkin festival is what really keeps us running at the Chamber of Commerce,” she says. 

“It’s the most talked-about event in Morton.”

The orange belt

John Ackerman is a lifelong Mortonite, too. He lives in a house designed by his great-grandfather, and farms fields his parents did.

Once a livestock farmer, Ackerman pivoted the family land to pumpkins back in the ‘80s, after commodity prices crashed and a couple of droughts wreaked havoc on the industry. “It was kind of a blood bath for farming,” he says.

Forty years later, Ackerman now grows 160 different pumpkin varieties, handpicking 30k pumpkins a year grown from seed from every continent but Antarctica, selling them from a shop on the farm. He also contracts part of his land to Nestlé to grow for the Libby’s factory.

Libby’s says its pumpkins travel less than 25 miles, on average, from patch to can. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The factory first opened in 1925, processing corn, string beans and peas. Over the years, the plant moved away from other crops, leaving peas and sweet corn behind to focus on pumpkins.

In 1967, a local businessman decided to throw a festival celebrating the crop. The week of the first festival, it rained for four days straight and the celebration earned no money. Still, 7k pumpkin pies were given away for free, and the local newspaper heralded it as a success.

By 1970, a pumpkin plant in nearby Eureka had closed, and operations centralized in Morton. (A few years later, Libby’s was acquired by Nestlé.)

The area falls in an agricultural sweet spot Ackerman calls “the orange belt.” Too far south is too warm, with too many diseases. Go too far north and the growing season is too short. “Here in central Illinois, we’re right in the middle.” Add to that some dark, rich soil and farms with generations of experience.

If you’re after pumpkin mugs, keychains, postcards, t-shirts, drink cozies, baby bibs, or holiday ornaments, you can find them in Morton, Illinois. (Courtesy of Morton Chamber of Commerce)

In 1978, the state governor declared Morton the pumpkin capital of the world. At the time, 85% of the world’s canned pumpkin was processed at Libby’s. (A Nestlé spokesperson declined to comment when asked if that number still holds, offering instead that over the past 17 years they’ve harvested more than 2m tons of pumpkin in Morton.)

Today it sells enough canned pumpkin to make, on average, 72m pies a year.

Place-based economics

According to Gary Winslett, associate professor of political science and director of the international politics and economics program at Middlebury College, manufacturing jurisdictions need the following to thrive:

• Right-to-work laws, which block mandatory union membership and typically lead to lower wages for workers
• Cheap energy
• Affordable housing
• Low-cost land
• Fast permitting
• Low taxes
• Immigration 

And the manufacturing landscape in the Midwest has been gutted. As Winslett outlined in the Washington Post, the Rust Belt once produced almost half of all U.S. manufacturing exports. Today, it produces less than a quarter, and the South produces double that.

As manufacturing employment has slightly recovered since 2020, southern states are faring far better than the Midwest.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Still, Winslett points out, the western Midwest is more insulated from the shift, in part because it’s an agricultural powerhouse that knows how to lean into what it has to offer.

“Place-based economics is more important than people often give it credit for,” he says. “Why is Vermont the third-most tourism dependent state behind Hawaii and Alaska? Because it’s beautiful where I’m driving and we’re partway between Boston and New York. People come for the weekend. Different places have different advantages.”

Morton has gone beyond identifying what makes the area unique — they’re quite literally celebrating it. Winslett likens the strategy to destinations like Scotland (scotch), Modena, Italy (vinegar) and Champagne, France (champagne).

“A lot of places are interested in smartly connecting their product to a brand,” Winslett says. “You see it in the EU a lot. It’s cool to see an example in the U.S.”

Pumpkin pies pile up in an Illinois grocery store ahead of Thanksgiving weekend. (Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

Winslett points to an economic principle called the manufacturing multiplier effect as something playing out in towns like Morton.

The effect works something like this: for every manufacturing job, more jobs in other sectors are created as a result. Research differs on how many jobs, but: 

• One University of California, Berkeley study found that every manufacturing job created also created 1.59 jobs in other industries.
• According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, one manufacturing job spawns 2.2 other jobs.
• The National Association of Manufacturers says that for every $1 spent in manufacturing, there’s a total impact of $2.64 on the economy at large.

Supporting the farming and canning of pumpkins, then, is a no-brainer. 

“There’s a reason beyond just agricultural pride,” Winslett says.

Corn maze farewell

This year, Ackerman is setting up his corn maze for the last time.

Ackerman Family Farms opens to the public every festival season, offering baby goats for petting and decorative pumpkins for purchase. As costs of living continue to rise, he says, keeping the public-facing business going stopped making sense economically. He’s choosing not to see it as a sign of things to come. The worry that the Libby’s factory might pull out of Morton is always lingering in the back of his mind, he says.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

But for now, he’ll take his wife down to the school grounds to the carnival rides, and sell a few more pumpkins to departing revelers as they pull out along the interstate toward home, a water tower bedecked with a pumpkin standing tall over town waving them off.

“We have just a little slice of Americana here,” Ackerman says.

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