HARRISON – When the millennium hit, Harrison shrugged off the Y2K fears by holding a New Year’s Eve party with a ball drop, in the time-honored tradition of New York City’s Times Square.

This Friday, the ball drop is coming back, with a bigger, brighter twinkling sphere built by volunteers at the behest of Harrison’s Bicentennial Committee.

The ball, at just under 5 feet in diameter with 238 lights, will sparkle with 1,700 watts of illumination atop a 60-foot flagpole that has been erected at the new town office at 20 Front St.

It will be lowered during 10-second countdown amid screams of “Happy New Year” at midnight. A gala dance from 8 to 11:30 p.m. at the nearby Harrison Fire Station will precede the event.

The affair will mark the official kickoff of a yearlong bicentennial celebration, which will include major events every month and a special birthday party marking the March 15, 1805, incorporation of the town.

Organizers of the New Year’s Eve dance are encouraging people to attend in 1800-era attire, but all are welcome in either casual or formal attire, said organizer Stephanie Dyer. Tickets are $25 each and cover the cost of the entertainment, the Gil Donatelli Band.

Everyone is welcome to the New Year’s Eve event, Dyer said.

“We’re celebrating 200 years of Harrison but we want other people to come in and celebrate with us,” she said.

Local electrician Russ Merrill headed up the team of volunteers who have worked since August to bring a New Year’s Eve ball to Harrison. On Wednesday he and others were “still tweaking” the wiring that will allow for a measured, even descent.

“You just don’t put it on a flagpole and expect it to come down straight and square,” he said. “A lot of things got to line up.”

He plans to light it around dusk New Year’s Eve, and keep it up for a while after the New Year.

“It will be pretty impressive,” he said, adding that he believes Harrison is the only town in Maine to have a New Year’s Eve ball drop.

“Even in the millennium, we were the only ones with a ball north of New York,” he said. The millennium ball was a wooden affair with rope lighting, on a temporary pole. The new ball is intended to be used year after year, making the ball drop an annual tradition in Harrison.

Merrill said the ball will be placed in storage the rest of the year, and the flagpole will be used for flying the American flag. He said the project cost between $8,000 and $10,000, which will be taken from the roughly $25,000 raised by taxes over recent years for the bicentennial celebration.

Harrison was first settled around 1793 and was carved out of portions of Otisfield and Bridgton. It was named after Harrison Gray Otis, a onetime mayor of Boston and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

After the New Year’s Eve kickoff to the 200th birthday party, the Bicentennial Committee plans a winter carnival and ice harvest in February, a bonfire and Easter Egg hunt in March, and May baskets and an old-time planting day in May, Dyer said.

Over the summer there will be band concerts at a new bandstand being constructed at Crystal Lake Park. The committee hopes to form a community band as well.

Old Home Days are planned for July 13-16, and soon after, the Narrow Gauge Railroad will operate at Scribner’s Mills. Back to the Past at Scribner’s Mills follows on Aug. 6 and 7, and members hope to build a steel replica of a canal boat to recall the era of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal.

More information on the New Year’s Eve events may be obtained by calling Dyer at 583-9075.