Neuse River Festival

The Neuse River Festival of 1932 is the origin point of the central love story in The Notebook, the moment when Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson first meet and instantly recognize a connection that will shape the rest of their lives. What begins as an ordinary small-town celebration becomes the catalyst for a summer of perfect love, a love that is cut short by class differences and parental interference, yet never forgotten. The festival's opening night is the first scene in a memory that both characters carry for fourteen years, a memory that ultimately compels Allie to return to New Bern on the eve of her wedding to another man.

The Meeting

It is the opening night of the Neuse River Festival in June 1932, just after Noah's graduation. The town of New Bern has turned out in full, enjoying barbecues and games of chance. The night is humid, a detail Noah remembers clearly years later. He arrives alone and strolls through the crowd looking for friends. He finds Fin and Sarah, two people he grew up with, talking to a girl he has never seen before. She is pretty, he remembers thinking, and when he finally joins them, she looks his way with a pair of hazy eyes. "Hi," she says simply as she offers her hand. "Finley's told me a lot about you." It is an ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgotten had it been anyone but her. But as Noah shakes her hand and meets those striking emerald eyes, he knows before he takes his next breath that she is the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again. She seems that good, that perfect.

The Summer That Follows

From the festival, the relationship develops like a tornado wind. Fin tells Noah that Allie is spending the summer in New Bern with her family because her father works for a tobacco firm. Though Noah only nods, the way Allie is looking at him makes his silence seem okay. Fin laughs then, because he knows what is happening, and Sarah suggests they get some cherry cokes. The four of them stay at the festival until the crowds are thin and everything closes up for the night. They meet the following day, and the day after that, and soon become inseparable. Every morning but Sunday, when Noah has to go to church, he finishes his chores as quickly as possible, then makes a straight line to Fort Totten Park, where Allie is waiting for him. Because she is a newcomer and has not lived in a small town before, they spend their days doing things that are completely new to her. He teaches her how to bait a line and fish the shallows for largemouth bass and takes her exploring through the backwoods of the Croatan Forest. They ride in canoes and watch summer thunderstorms, and it seems as though they have always known each other. At the town dance in the tobacco barn, it is Allie who teaches Noah how to waltz and do the Charleston, and though they stumble through the first few songs, her patience with him eventually pays off, and they dance together until the music ends. He walks her home afterwards, and when they pause on the porch after saying good night, he kisses her for the first time and wonders why he has waited as long as he has.

Class Divide and Parental Opposition

The festival also introduces the central conflict of their relationship: class difference. Allie's parents, particularly her mother Anne Nelson, disapprove of Noah because he is from a different class, too poor. Most of the summer, Allie has to make excuses to her parents whenever they want to see each other. It is not that they do not like him—it is that they will never approve if their daughter becomes serious with someone like him. "I don't care what my parents think, I love you and always will," Allie would say. "We'll find a way to be together." But in the end they cannot. By early September the tobacco has been harvested and she has no choice but to return with her family to Winston-Salem. "Only the summer is over, Allie, not us," Noah says the morning she leaves. "We'll never be over." But they are. For a reason he does not understand, the letters he writes go unanswered—letters that Allie's mother has been intercepting and hiding.

Lasting Significance

The memory of the festival and the summer it inaugurates becomes a ghost that haunts Noah for fourteen years. He sees Allie in Fort Totten Park, their place, every time he walks by. When he sits on the porch at night with his guitar, he sees her beside him, listening as he plays the music of his childhood. Everywhere he looks, he sees things that bring her back to life. Gus, his friend, recognizes this immediately: "So that's the ghost you been running from." The festival is also the reason Allie returns. When she sees a newspaper article about Noah's restoration of the old house—the same house he brought her to that summer and promised he would one day own—she is compelled to visit him, three weeks before her wedding to Lon Hammond Jr. The memory of their meeting at the Neuse River Festival, and everything that followed, is the force that drives her to seek him out, to find out if the love they shared was real, and to ultimately make the choice that will define the rest of her life.