Sandy Spring’s Annual Strawberry Festival has been postponed until June 2025. The museum is taking a year to realign the Festival with its original mission and better host the event with community resources.
The Festival began as a community-oriented celebration but has since outgrown the Museum’s physical location and operational capacity. Last year, an estimated 20,000 people attended the event, resulting in parking difficulties and vendors running out of supplies.
Sandy Spring Museum Executive Director Allison Weiss also noted that the festival’s nature has changed since its initial conception.
“It was almost more like a county fair rather than [a] small, community festival where people came because they knew everybody that they saw… It just … lost that local feel to it,” Weiss told MCM.
Organizers want the Festival to return to being the center of regional folklife and be more aligned with the Sandy Spring Museum’s focus on the region’s cultural heritage. Past Festivals, according to the festival website, focused on 19th-century crafts, like shearing sheep, spinning wool, and blacksmithing.
Over the festival’s four decades of existence, community volunteer efforts steadily declined as people moved out of the area or aged out. This meant that, in addition to their regular responsibilities, museum staff workers took on the majority of festival planning.
Volunteers devote around six months to planning the Festival, which features two entertainment stages, art vendors, craft stations, food trucks, a petting zoo and a plant sale. Organizers are responsible for ordering supplies, recruiting more volunteers, and obtaining the necessary event permits, equipment and funds.
The Museum is currently focused on recruiting volunteers to lead the festival’s reimagining. Weiss also stated that attendance will likely be limited next year with ticket presales, which will be capped at 5,000 people.
“I think people are disappointed, but not surprised…that it’s not happening. They’re not surprised because they could see [the Festival had] just become almost unmanageable how large it got,” Weiss said.
Photo courtesy of Jill Connor Photography
