Annual Strawberry Festival at Sandy Spring Museum canceled for 2024

Museum to hold meeting Wednesday night for input on reimagining popular event that draws nearly 20,000

February 28, 2024 2:59 p.m.

Sandy Spring Museum is hosting a town hall meeting for community members at 7 p.m. Wednesday to gather input and discuss the future of the museum’s annual Strawberry Festival.

In early February, the museum announced that the festival, held since 1981, would be postponed until 2025. On its website, the museum said it had canceled this year’s event to make changes to the festival to suit its mission and size better and to identify volunteers who can help lead organizing efforts.

The meeting will be held at Sandy Spring Museum at 17901 Bentley Road in Sandy Spring.

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Allison Weiss, the museum’s executive director, told MoCo360 Tuesday that in recent years the festival had come to resemble a generic carnival rather than a celebration of the region’s folklife as intended.

“One of the things that we do is we’re the regional folklife center of Montgomery County,” Weiss said. “We feel like the festival could be much more focused on folklife specifically and less about the things that are generic, like the carnival games, and really highlight the cultural diversity of the area.”

Another key issue was that the number of people attending the festival had grown too large for the size of the festival space. The festival is held on the museum grounds, which measure about 3 acres, according to Weiss. With nearly 20,000 attendees at last year’s festival, the event “just got too big for the area,” she said, adding that the festival has sold more than 1,000 quarts of strawberries in recent years.

A lack of volunteers to run the festival was another problem, Weiss said.  For decades, the festival has been run by a dozen dedicated volunteers, but over time the group dwindled as volunteers grew older and dropped out and fewer people signed up to replace them.

“I just don’t think that volunteerism is the same as it was 30, 40 years ago,” Weiss said.

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As fewer people volunteered, the task of putting on the festival fell onto museum staff. So the museum is taking a pause to reflect and reevaluate the festival’s future with the community, according to Weiss.

In its earlier years, the festival was focused on the agricultural heritage of the county and featured 19th-century crafts such as sheering sheep, pinning wool and blacksmithing, according to Weiss, who said the festival initially started as a fundraising event for the museum.

At the town hall meeting, Weiss encourages community members to share stories and memories from past festivals also come ready with fresh ideas for the festival and the possibility of taking on a leadership role in organizing.

“People love coming to these events and I understand that, but I don’t think people realize the amount of work that goes into putting them on,” Weiss said. “And if people want to see something that feels community oriented, then they personally have to get involved in it. Otherwise, you know, it becomes this just generic festival that you outsource to a company that puts on festivals. What was really fun about this festival is that humanity was participating in putting it on.”

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