The Meredith Sculpture Walk Just Turned Over More Than Half Its Collection. One Piece Never Moves.

If you walked the Meredith Sculpture Walk last summer and figure you have seen it, you haven't. Not the current version. The 2026–2027 installation marks the thirteenth year of the walk, and of the 32 sculptures now standing along Main Street, Mill Falls Marketplace, the Town Docks, Hesky Park, and Scenic Park, 18 are brand new this year. That is more than half the collection replaced since last season.

This isn't a curatorial quirk. The Meredith Sculpture Walk is a juried exhibition where nearly every piece is for sale directly from the artist, and the Greater Meredith Program, which runs it, does not broker those sales or collect a fee. A sculpture you photographed last October could be sitting in someone's yard in Vermont by now. The walk you remember is not really a fixed collection of outdoor art. It behaves more like inventory that turns over on a public street, and this year's turnover rate isn't even unusual. Back in 2021, the walk's eighth year, 25 of 33 sculptures were new installs, a turnover north of 75 percent. High replacement is closer to the norm than the exception here.

What's Actually New This Year

Among the pieces added for 2026–2027, according to the current guide published by the Mill Falls Resort Collection, are Lake Life Walk, Moonlit Sails, Dragonfly, Fish Sticks, Beacon, Balancing Act – First Steps, A Moment Out of Time, and Kephir, Scarab Beetle. If any of those catch your eye on a walk this fall, that is the moment to ask about it, not next spring. Once a piece sells, it leaves.

The route itself hasn't changed much in years. It still connects the upper end of Main Street through Mill Falls Marketplace, down to the Town Docks, and out along Meredith Bay through Hesky and Scenic Parks. What changes is what you find standing in those same spots.

Permanent Pieces on the Walk

Not everything on the walk turns over. A handful of pieces are classified as permanent, meaning they aren't part of the annual juried rotation and aren't going anywhere. The best known of these is Archie, a bronze tribute by sculptor Valery Mahuchy to Bob Montana, the cartoonist who spent nearly thirty years living in Meredith and drawing the original Archie comic strip from a house in town.

Montana's connection to Meredith wasn't incidental to his work. His father ran a restaurant and small farm here when Bob was a boy, and after Montana made a career of Archie in New York, he and his wife Peggy moved back to Meredith permanently by 1948, buying an old New England farmhouse and raising four children while he kept drawing. He'd drawn the very first Archie comic book years earlier in a rented cottage on Lake Waukewan, and once he was home in Meredith for good, the town started showing up in the strip itself: Lake Winnipesaukee, Hart's Turkey Farm, and the Gunstock ski area all appeared as backdrops, and Dartmouth College became "Dartboard College" for a running joke. Montana's own dentist, Dr. Frederick Deneault, became the strip's Dr. DeMalt. A Meredith woman's pet squirrel, known locally as His Nibs, became the character Lootsnoot. For a stretch starting in 1948, the weekly Meredith News ran its own Archie-only page and tracked which local resident had been written into that week's strip, printing it on the front page when it happened.

Montana died in January 1975, at 54, while cross-country skiing near his home in Meredith. Decades later, in 2018, the town dedicated a life-size bronze statue of Archie in Community Park to coincide with Meredith's 250th anniversary. That statue is the same Archie now standing as a permanent fixture on the Sculpture Walk, which means one of the pieces on the entire route guaranteed to still be there next August is a monument to a man who spent thirty years quietly writing this town into a strip that ran in more than 750 newspapers.

How the Walk Actually Works, If You Live Here

There's no admission and no required app. Printed maps sit in kiosks around town and at some shops and hotels, an interactive map is available online, and most sculptures now carry a small QR code with the artist's name, hometown, and materials. That's the whole system. You can do the entire route in about half an hour if you're moving, longer if you stop to read every tag or duck into a shop along Main Street.

For anyone who prefers a guided version, the Greater Meredith Program has run docent-led tours on Wednesday mornings all season, meeting at 10 a.m. in front of Innisfree Bookshop inside Mill Falls Marketplace. This year's run started July 8 and wrapped up September 9, which means the guided season for 2026 has closed. From here through next summer, the walk is a self-guided experience only, which honestly suits it. Half the appeal is stumbling onto a piece you didn't expect while walking to get coffee or heading down to the docks.

Where It Fits Once the Leaves Turn

Fall changes the walk without changing the route. The same sculptures that photograph one way against July's green lawns look different against foliage and low autumn light along the bay, and the walk stays open and free through the season. If you're already planning a Saturday around Main Street this fall, the Autumn Craft Festival on the Lake runs October 3 and 4 at Mill Falls Marketplace, the same stretch of ground where a third of the sculpture walk sits, so the two fold into the same outing without any extra planning.

None of this requires treating Meredith as a place to evaluate. It's a place people already live, and the sculpture walk is one of the few things here that quietly resets itself every year without anyone posting about it. More than half the collection is different from what stood in these same spots twelve months ago. The rest, especially Archie, is a reminder that Meredith has been getting written into things far more widely read than this post for a lot longer than the sculpture walk has existed.

If you're weighing what comes next for a Meredith property, whether that's a first home, a lake camp that's been in the family, or a move within the Lakes Region, Martha Trepanier has spent nearly three decades in this town and is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.