One thing leads to another … and another, and another.

That’s why these columns sometimes mix apples and oranges. Or, in this case, apples and pumpkins.

It won’t be long before all kinds of spooky or silly grins will be staring back at us from hundreds of cleverly carved jack-o’-lanterns. That makes pumpkins a timely subject, I thought, so I went looking for information about the Androscoggin “Pumpkin Freshet” sometime in the late 1800s. Given last week’s downpours of two or more inches, I wondered if another one might be possible.

My grandfather told stories of that legendary event many years ago. I remember his descriptions of heavy fall rains that sent floodwaters from the Androscoggin over the low-lying farm fields of Canton.

Pumpkins by the thousands were ripped from their vines and they floated down the river for miles.

I figured I could easily verify such an event. The Internet never fails – never fails to lead me off on unexpected tangents. I found plenty of Web pages about a pumpkin freshet in Wyoming not long after the Revolutionary War, a 1786 pumpkin episode on Pennsylvania’s Schuykill River, the 1824 pumpkin freshet on the White River in Arkansas, and a well-known flood and pumpkin deluge on the Delaware River in 1903. But nothing about the Androscoggin. Was this one of those myths that grew from similar stories around the country? Was it so commonplace in those years that it wasn’t recorded?

Then my pumpkin research took a turn. I read something about the “long pie pumpkin” and its rescue from probable extinction by a Livermore Falls farm family.

Last week, I wrote about heritage apples and the search for the Briggs Auburn by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. On a Web site of Fedco Seeds in Waterville, I discovered the Androscoggin pumpkin connection.

The Fedco cooperative deals in all kinds of heirloom seeds, and they tell about this variety of pumpkin that’s said to have originated on the Azores and was brought to Nantucket on a whaling ship in 1832.

First known as the Nantucket pumpkin, it migrated north to Maine.

The Fedco site said, “By the 1930s long pie had long been the pie pumpkin of choice among gardeners and growers in Androscoggin County, who may not even have been aware that in other parts of the country pie pumpkins were round.”

The Fedco information said the long pie pumpkin “looks like an overgrown green zucchini.” It doesn’t turn orange until well into storage.

“Were it not for John Navazio, the variety might well be extinct today,” according to Fedco. In the late 1980s, Navazio had a booth at the Common Ground Country Fair. LeRoy Souther Jr. of Livermore Falls brought a long pie pumpkin to him. Navazio saved the seeds and eventually introduced the variety into another company’s seed catalog.

Recently, a grower in Thorndike produced seeds from a crop of 16.5 pounds. That was enough for Fedco to offer them for sale: “If even one percent of these seeds are purchased and grown by seed savers, the variety will no longer be endangered.”

LeRoy Souther told the author of the Fedco history that his mother got her original seeds from a Livermore Falls neighbor, Harry Hurd, sometime in the 1940s or ’50s. In 1998, his mother brought up some long pie pumpkin from her cellar that she had canned 25 years earlier in 1973. She made a pie for a Grange supper.

Souther’s mother was delighted to learn that long pie had survived because she no longer had any, the Fedco history said.

Much of Fedco’s historical background comes from Jon Thurston, who runs an heirloom seed project at Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro.

The long pie pumpkin will never replace the familiar jack-o’-lantern variety, but it’s interesting to learn about it.

I also now know that, botanically, there are no such things as pumpkins.

They’re members of the Cucurbita genus, which includes squash and cucumbers. They’re native to North America and their seeds have been found in Mexico in burial grounds going back 5,000 to 7,000 years.

Pumpkin flesh was once believed to remove freckles and it was used to treat snake bites.

Now, there’s a fact you can probably use, come Halloween.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].