For four decades, the South Windsor Strawberry Festival has been about as close to a town institution as a single-day event can get. Free admission. Free parking. The “world’s best” strawberry shortcake. Train rides, a petting zoo, face painting, live music, and a Miss Strawberry Pageant. On a clear June Saturday, it draws somewhere between 8,000 and 16,000 people to the fairgrounds — easily the most attended event in town.
What a surprising number of those attendees don’t realize, even as they line up for shortcake, is who is behind it: the festival is organized by and raises money for the South Windsor Republican Town Committee.
That fact has been circulating again in recent days, and for a lot of residents it’s news. The reaction online has been a mix of disbelief and “wait, really?” — people who have gone for years, brought their kids, and never connected the cheerful strawberry logo to a partisan political committee.
It’s not hidden — but it’s easy to miss
To be clear, the Republican Town Committee’s role isn’t a secret. It’s stated plainly on the festival’s own website, which notes that “the South Windsor Republican Town Committee members proudly organize and run this event.” This year’s promotional materials carry the standard political disclaimer — “Paid for by the South Windsor Republican Town Committee” — and the committee’s name appears on event listings and in local coverage every year.
But disclosure and awareness are two different things. For the average family showing up for a free, kid-friendly summer afternoon, the fine print rarely registers. The branding is strawberries and shortcake, not elephants and ballots. And so each year a fresh wave of residents learns, often with some surprise, that the proceeds from the most beloved community event in town flow to a partisan political organization.
How much money, and where it goes
The financial stakes are modest by the standards of state politics but meaningful at the local level. In past reporting, the festival was described as raising roughly $15,000 to $20,000 for the Republican Town Committee.
The committee has consistently framed those dollars as staying close to home. In local coverage, RTC members have said none of the funds raised are used at the state or national level, and that proceeds support local organizations and youth programs. The committee emphasizes the event’s role in building “community spirit” and offering families a low- or no-cost day out — a framing it has leaned into as the festival has grown.
Supporters of that framing point out that the admission, the parking, the train, the pageant, and much of the children’s programming are genuinely free, and that hundreds of volunteers — not paid political operatives — make the day happen.
This isn’t the first time it’s flared up
The current round of surprise echoes a more pointed controversy from years past, when the festival’s political character spilled into open conflict.
That year, two groups — a local Cub Scout pack and the South Windsor Chamber of Commerce — withdrew from the festival shortly before it opened, after questions were raised about whether they should be participating in what is, formally, a political fundraiser. The dispute escalated all the way to the Boy Scouts’ national office, which barred the pack from taking part.
The festival’s chairperson at the time, who also chaired the Republican Town Committee, defended the event as a town-wide tradition and said the partisan sponsorship had never been concealed. A local Democratic official who had raised the participation question countered that the bottom line was simple: whatever happened on the festival grounds, the money ultimately went to fund one party’s political activity. The episode produced a heated town council exchange and lingering hard feelings on both sides — and it has never fully settled the underlying question of whether a partisan fundraiser can also be a “community event.”
The question that keeps coming back
More than a decade later, the tension hasn’t gone away, because the basic facts haven’t changed: a single political party organizes, brands, and profits from what most of the town experiences as a nonpartisan civic tradition.
For some residents, that’s a non-issue — the event is fun, it’s free, the money stays local, and the organizers are open about who they are. For others, learning the festival’s true nature reframes the whole thing, raising the same question the Cub Scout dispute raised long ago: should the town’s signature summer celebration be tied to any political party at all?
The South Windsor Strawberry Festival returns this Saturday, June 13, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at its new home at the John J. Mitchell Fairgrounds, 75 Brookfield Street. Admission is free. The shortcake, by all accounts, is still excellent. And the question of what, exactly, the event is — a community tradition, a political fundraiser, or both at once — will be along for the ride, as it is every year.
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