In 2015, a woman named Lacy Antonson moved to Gray and noticed something missing. The town used to hold an Old Home Days celebration, the kind of end-of-summer gathering plenty of small Maine towns still keep on their calendars, but Gray's had quietly disappeared. Antonson pitched the town manager and Town Council on bringing something back. Months later, in 2016, the first event ran under the name End of Summer Fest.
Ten years later, that single afternoon has grown into the Gray Wild Blueberry Festival, a two-day event with more than 110 vendors filling the Henry Pennell Municipal Complex on Main Street. This year's expansion to a Friday evening kickoff and a full Saturday, its first time running two days in a decade of existence, isn't really the story. The story is what else happened to Gray in the same ten years while nobody was watching closely: a walking trail that took seven years to finish connecting streets that were already a five-minute walk apart, a business directory the town only just built to keep track of businesses that had already opened, and a grocery store that had to double in size to keep up with a town that had already grown past it.
Gray didn't get bigger this year. It got caught up.
The Year Gray Noticed the Gap
The same year Antonson revived the town's lost tradition, the Town of Gray also broke ground on something else: the Village Area Loop Trail, a paved walking connector envisioned in the town's 2014 Bike-Pedestrian Plan. Construction began in 2016 with a $31,088 grant from the Maine Recreational Trails Program, the same year the festival launched.
That's not a coincidence worth over-reading, but it is a useful marker. 2016 is when Gray's town government started acting on things residents had apparently been noticing for a while: no shared summer gathering, and no easy way to walk between the parts of town that were functionally close together but not actually connected by a sidewalk or path.
A Trail That Took Seven Years to Admit the Neighborhoods Were Already Close
The Village Area Loop Trail didn't arrive all at once. Phase 1A looped around the town hall recreation complex. Phase 1B, completed in the spring of 2017, paved a connector between Hancock Street and the plaza shopping center, and added sidewalk improvements along Brown Street with a new crosswalk across Route 115. A third piece, the connector behind Cumberland Farms, opened in 2018. The final piece, a gateway parcel extension funded by a $66,877 Cumberland County Community Development Block Grant, didn't open until 2023.
Seven years, four separate construction phases, to formally connect a loop that residents had probably been cutting through informally for years anyway. The town's own Nordic Pole Walking Group was photographed using the trail back in 2022, a full year before the final segment was even finished. People were already walking the route the infrastructure was still catching up to.
That pattern, infrastructure arriving after the need was already obvious, shows up again twice more in 2026.
The Business Directory Arrived After the Businesses Did
In June 2026, Gray unveiled a new interactive business directory built on a platform called Bludot, mapping more than 250 local businesses with detailed listings and improved search, a real upgrade from the town's previous directory. According to the Portland Press Herald, Gray's Communications Director Kyle Hadyniak said the goal was to modernize the relationship between town government and the business community, a project the Economic Development, Communications, and IT departments had been working toward for at least a year before launch. Gray is not alone in adopting the platform. Westbrook and Scarborough use it too.
This new directory is more than just a listing of businesses, it is a tool for strengthening community connections.
That's Interim Town Manager Lauren Asselin, describing the launch in a press release. It's a nice line about civic pride, and it fits the timeline. A directory that maps more than 250 businesses is a measure of how much the town's commercial base has grown.
The Grocery Store Is the Clearest Evidence
If the business directory is the town catching up on paper, the Hannaford on Shaker Road is the same story in square footage. Construction on a 12,000-square-foot addition began in the fall of 2025, and by July 2026 the expansion had doubled the store's original size, according to the Shelby Report. The expanded store added room in produce, meat, and seafood, more grab-and-go options in the deli, self-checkout registers, and a private consultation room for immunizations at the pharmacy, plus a parking lot expansion and a second entrance. Todd Bullen, Hannaford's VP of retail operations, framed the project as a commitment to the community when the expansion was announced. The company also donated $15,000 to local nonprofits, including the Gray Community Food Pantry, to mark the opening.
This is the same stretch of Shaker Road that runs past the restored 1870 Shaker barn, one of the town's older landmarks. A building more than 150 years old sits a short drive from a grocery store that just needed to double its footprint to serve the town around it. Both are true at once, and that's most of what Gray is right now: old bones with new pressure on them.
Ten Years, Two Days, One Weekend
Which brings the story back to this weekend. The Gray Wild Blueberry Festival ran its Friday evening kickoff on August 7 and its full Saturday session on August 8, the first time in ten years the event has needed two days to hold everything it's grown into. It's still run by a volunteer committee under the town, still free, and still built around the same wild blueberry theme Antonson picked back in 2016. But a festival that started as one afternoon in a park now needs a whole extra evening just to fit its own vendor list.
None of these four things, the festival, the trail, the directory, the grocery store, happened because someone at town hall decided Gray needed to grow. They happened because Gray had already grown, in ways that took a resident noticing a missing festival, a Nordic pole walking group using an unfinished trail, and a town deciding its growing list of businesses deserved a better directory. The infrastructure keeps arriving a step behind the life that's already here.
If you already live in Gray, none of this is exactly a surprise. You've probably walked the connector behind Cumberland Farms, or noticed the Hannaford parking lot got bigger, or heard from a neighbor who has a booth at the festival this year. What might be new is seeing all four threads laid next to each other, and noticing they're the same thread. Gray keeps being a little bit bigger than its own paperwork admits, and 2026 is the year several pieces of that paperwork finally caught up at once.
If you're the kind of person who likes watching a town figure itself out in real time, Gray is worth paying attention to for a while longer. And if you ever want a local's read on where this town is headed next, from someone who watches these threads as closely as the people pulling them, Ashley Fearon and the team at A Team Realty are always happy to talk it through.
