Saturday morning, Summer Street closes to traffic at 11 a.m. so a parade can pass through downtown Adams on its way to Center Street, then Park Street, then Hoosac Street, ending at the Adams Visitor Center. Most people walking out to watch will call it the parade before the street fair. That gets the order backward. The parade is not an opener. It is the reason the fair exists on this particular Saturday at all, and it has been the reason for a hundred and fifty years.
The Adams Alert Hose Company No. 1 was formed on May 20, 1876, when 33 young men met at the Greylock House and organized themselves into a volunteer hose company to serve the town. That predates the Adams Street Fair by roughly 145 years. The fair, now in its sixth year, was built to raise money for the town's first responders. It grew up around an institution that was already old when the fair's founders were born. Saturday, the fair runs from noon to 6 p.m. at the Visitor Center on Hoosac Street, but the parade that precedes it is the thing actually being observed.
A Year of Marking Time Before Anyone Noticed
If you missed the earlier moments in this anniversary year, you were not alone. The Alerts have been quietly working through a calendar of their own since spring, and most of it happened without a street fair attached.
In the spring, the company held a ceremony at Bellevue Cemetery to unearth a time capsule that had been buried in 1976, on the occasion of the company's centennial. That capsule was opened to honor the firefighters who served in the fifty years between 1976 and now. On August 8, the Alerts held their 150th anniversary ball at the Greylock Glen Outdoor Center, the net-zero visitor building at the base of Mount Greylock that opened in October 2024. Only after those two quieter markers does Saturday's parade and fair arrive as the public-facing capstone.
That sequencing matters if you live here. The town has been observing this anniversary in the way a family observes a milestone: privately first, with the people who actually did the work, before opening it up to everyone else. Saturday is the version built for a crowd. The cemetery ceremony and the ball were not.
What Saturday Actually Looks Like
The day runs in two distinct registers, civic ceremony first, then festival. Here is the shape of it:
- 11 a.m. The Alert Hose Company's 150th anniversary parade steps off on Summer Street, moving through Center Street and Park Street before ending on Hoosac Street at the Visitor Center.
- Noon to 6 p.m. The sixth annual Adams Street Fair takes over the Visitor Center grounds at 3 Hoosac Street, with craft vendors, food trucks, an auction table, and cash-prize raffles benefiting the town's first responders.
- 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. DJ Kane provides music through the early fair hours.
- 1:30, 2:30, and 4:30 p.m. Illusionist David Garrity performs.
- 3 to 6 p.m. Rusted Chains closes out the fair's music slate, with a TIW wrestling event also on the schedule at 4 p.m. and McKay's Traveling Petting Zoo new to the children's area this year.
- 9 p.m. After a three-hour break following the fair's close, the Alerts set off fireworks at Valley Street Field to close the anniversary weekend.
It is a long day built around a short parade route, and the parade is the part that will still matter next year when the fair has moved on to its seventh iteration and someone else's anniversary.
Four Generations in One Fire Station
The detail that separates this from a generic small-town parade story is who is walking in it. Adams Fire Chief David J. Lennon, who also serves as the Alerts' foreman, is a third-generation member of the company. His son makes it four generations under one roof, which is not a metaphor. It is the same station, the same drill nights, the same Tuesday-evening bell.
Every Tuesday, members still meet to train. In good weather they take equipment out for simulations. In bad weather, the drills move inside the station, winding hose by hand. On one recent Tuesday, seventeen people answered the 7 p.m. bell, including two women and a student from McCann Technical School. Lennon has been candid about what that turnout means against a broader trend: fewer people commit to hometown institutions now that commuting and remote work have loosened the tie between where people live and where they show up. The Alerts have kept that tie intact for a century and a half, which is a harder thing to sustain in 2026 than it was in 1876, not an easier one.
The company's most cited call remains 1984, the year fire destroyed the Arnold Print Works complex, one of four major fires the Alerts responded to that year alone, including a night the company worked the Berkshire Metal Spinning building at seventeen below zero. That history is part of why the parade carries weight beyond nostalgia. The people marching Saturday are the same people who show up when the pager goes off at 3 a.m., not just on the one Saturday a year when the town claps for them.
Even the ornamental parade cart has its own small story. It was recently restored by the Clark Art Institute, which means the object leading Saturday's procession down Summer Street has been through conservation work more commonly associated with paintings than firehouses.
The Building That Keeps Showing Up
There is a second thread worth noticing if you spend much time in Adams outside of anniversary weekends. The Greylock Glen Outdoor Center, where the Alerts held their August ball, opened in October 2024 as a 9,000-square-foot, net-zero building at the base of Mount Greylock. Mass Audubon serves as the site's environmental education provider, running programming out of the center for adults, families, and school groups. Chez Hospitality Group handles food service. The doors from the building's Great Hall open directly onto the Glen Meadow Loop, a 1.57-mile accessible trail through meadow and wetland with the mountain in full view, and from there the property connects to the Gould Trail and the historic Thunderbolt Trail, the same steep run Civilian Conservation Corps crews cleared in the 1930s.
That building did not exist three years ago. Now it is where the town's oldest civic institution chose to hold its most formal anniversary event, and it is also where a lot of ordinary Saturday mornings start for people walking the meadow loop before the leaves turn. Adams is a town where a hundred-fifty-year-old fire company and a two-year-old net-zero visitor center end up sharing the same weekend without much friction. That is not a coincidence so much as a description of how a small town absorbs something new: it puts the new thing to work for the old occasions first.
What This Weekend Says About the Town
None of this is really about a parade route or a fireworks schedule. It is about what a place chooses to keep. Adams could have let the Alerts' 150th pass as an internal milestone, marked with a plaque and a dinner. Instead the town built a spring cemetery ceremony, a summer ball at its newest building, and a fall parade and street fair into one continuous observance, stretched across five months. That is a lot of civic effort for a volunteer hose company, and it tells you something about what this town still organizes itself around.
If you are heading downtown Saturday, watch the parade first. The fair afterward is worth the afternoon, and Rusted Chains closing out the music at 6 p.m. is a fine reason to stay. But the thing actually being marked, the thing that took 150 years to arrive at this particular Saturday, passes by at 11 a.m., and it is gone in a matter of minutes.
If you are thinking about what it means to put down roots in a town like this, whether you already call Adams home or you are weighing a move to the Berkshires, Diane Thorson can talk through what local life actually looks like here, season to season. Schedule a consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.
