Spring Events
Portland Strawberry Festival
The region's biggest spring festival — 80 years of strawberry shortcake, live music and small-town parade energy.
The region's biggest spring festival — 80 years of strawberry shortcake, live music and small-town parade energy.
Portland calls itself the Strawberry Capital of Tennessee, and every May since 1941 the town has thrown a four-day festival to prove it. It draws 40,000+ people to a town of 12,000 — a proper community festival with a Saturday parade, a strawberry-shortcake tent that serves thousands of servings a day, live music on two stages, a car show, a 5K, a beauty pageant and a proper carnival midway. It is the biggest event on the Robertson-Sumner-County calendar and worth planning a spring trip around.
The heart of it is the shortcake tent — $6 gets you a plate of biscuit, local strawberries and real whipped cream that the volunteer ladies of Portland assemble by the hundred. The Saturday morning parade (10am, down Main Street) is a full hour of fire trucks, tractors, high-school bands and homemade floats. Music runs Thursday through Sunday nights on the main stage; check the festival website for the year's headliners. The rides and games are cash-friendly but most vendors take cards.
It falls the second full weekend of May. Book Portland or Springfield hotels three months out — everything fills. Come Saturday for the parade and the biggest crowd, or Sunday morning for a calmer festival with all the food still open. Park at the free shuttle lots on the edge of town; downtown itself is closed to traffic. Combine with a drive to a local pick-your-own strawberry farm — several open specifically for festival week.
Getting here means driving — Portland is a separate town in Sumner County, about 21 miles east of Springfield, and there is no public bus, rail or rideshare depth in either county. From the Robertson County Courthouse square in Springfield, take TN-76 East; it runs two lanes through farmland and the edge of Cross Plains and puts you in Portland in roughly 30 minutes with no festival traffic, 45 on Saturday morning. Coming up I-65, use exit 117 (TN-52) and drive about two miles west into town; from the White House exit 108 cluster of motels it is a straight 11 miles north on US-31W. Nashville International Airport is 50 miles and about 55 minutes away on a clear day. Leave Springfield by 8:15am on parade Saturday if you want a curb spot without stress.
Nothing at the gate costs anything, which makes this an unusually cheap day out — the spending starts once you are inside. The shortcake plate is $6 and is the single thing you should not skip. A day of eating (barbecue, funnel cake, lemonade, a second shortcake, because there is always a second shortcake) runs about $20-30 per adult and $12-15 per child. The carnival midway is the budget killer: rides are sold by ticket sheet with a day wristband offered on some days, and a family of four can spend more on the midway in two hours than on everything else combined — set a limit before you walk in. The 5K charges separate registration, cheaper online in advance. Parking and the shuttle are free. Craft booths and the smallest food stands are safest with cash.
Hour by hour, Thursday is the soft opening and the calmest four hours of the whole event — booths are stocked, queues are nonexistent, and the shortcake volunteers still have their energy. Friday evening fills with locals straight from school and work. Saturday is the peak: park by 8:45am, curb by 9:15am, parade at 10am, and expect the shortcake tent to run 20-30 minutes deep between 11:30 and 2pm. Mid-afternoon, roughly 2-5pm, is the worst window — Middle Tennessee in mid-May runs to the mid-80s F with little shade on Main Street and thunderstorms that build fast. The midway is at its best after dark. Sunday morning is the insider's answer: full food, full crafts, half the crowd. Outside the four days, Richland Park is simply a town park — do not drive here in July expecting strawberries.
It suits families with children under 12 better than almost anything else in the two counties in May, and it suits teenagers only after dark, when the midway lights up and the main stage takes over. Wheelchair and stroller users get flat, level ground on Main Street and paved paths through Richland Park, but the grassed vendor areas churn to mud within an hour of rain and the facilities are portable toilets, not fixed ones. If you have exactly one hour — a gap before dinner, a stop on the way to Bowling Green — you can park, ride the shuttle in, eat a shortcake and walk the length of the booths, and that is a genuinely complete visit. Skip it entirely on a wet afternoon: this is an outdoor festival with almost no indoor shelter.
Fold the rest of the day into the drive. Portland's Main Street shops and the walking track at Richland Park are on the festival footprint, five minutes on foot from the shortcake tent. The pick-your-own strawberry farms on the county roads north and east of town open for festival week — ask at the information booth for the current year's list, since the fields that open vary with the season. Heading back toward Springfield, Cross Plains sits halfway along TN-76 and Thomas Drugs there still runs an old-fashioned lunch counter and soda fountain, which is a better late lunch than anything on the midway. Bledsoe Creek State Park on Old Hickory Lake is about 30 minutes southeast for a walk and a swim. Franklin, Kentucky is 15 miles north on US-31W.
The honest caveats: the carnival is a standard travelling midway of the kind you have already ridden at a state fair, priced accordingly, and it is the part visitors most often regret spending on. The parade is an hour of fire trucks, tractors and homemade floats — charming, local, and not a spectacle; if you were promised Macy's you will be disappointed. The name misleads people too: there are no strawberry fields at the festival itself and not all of the fruit is grown within sight of town, so if picking berries is the goal, drive to a farm first and treat the festival as dessert. Cell signal degrades badly with 40,000 people on it, ATM queues are long by Saturday noon, and if it rains the parking fields get soft. Bring cash, bring sunscreen, come Sunday.
Free entry · Food, rides and shortcake individually priced
Mid-May, four days · Thu-Sun 10:00-22:00
Strawberry shortcake tent — Center of the festival grounds on Main Street
Saturday parade — Main Street, 10am start at the high school, ends at the park
Main stage music — Richland Park stage, nightly Thu-Sun
Book a hotel three months ahead — everything within 20 miles fills.
Saturday parade at 10am is the highlight; get a curb spot by 9:15.
Bring cash for the smallest vendors; the shortcake tent takes cards.
Free — you only pay for food, rides and shortcake. The shortcake plate is $6 and is the one purchase everybody should make. Budget around $20-30 per adult and $12-15 per child for a full day of eating, plus whatever you allow for the carnival midway, which is sold by ticket sheet or day wristband and is easily the largest line item for a family. Parking and the shuttle cost nothing. Bring cash for the small craft and food stands; the shortcake tent takes cards.
Entry is free the whole festival, all four days. There is no gate, no wristband and no entry ticket at any hour between Thursday and Sunday. Free also covers the Saturday parade, the main-stage music at Richland Park, the car show and browsing every craft booth on Main Street. What is not free: food, the carnival rides, 5K registration and any reserved pageant or concert seating that a given year happens to sell separately. Check the festival website before you drive if a specific headliner is your reason for coming.
Half a day for a proper visit; a full day if you're doing the parade and evening music. Four hours covers the shortcake tent, a lap of the booths and time on the midway without rushing. Parade day stretches longer: arrive by 8:45am to park, hold a curb spot from 9:15, watch until about 11am, then eat. If you are stopping en route to somewhere else, one hour is genuinely enough to park, shuttle in, eat a shortcake and walk the length of Main Street.
Second full weekend of May each year, Thursday through Sunday. Hours run 10:00 to 22:00 daily, and the festival has been staged in Portland since 1941, making it one of the oldest continuously running community festivals in Middle Tennessee. Dates shift by a few days year to year with how the calendar falls, so confirm before booking anything non-refundable. Outside those four days there is nothing to see — Richland Park reverts to a town park, and the strawberry farms outside town keep their own short picking season.
No tickets for entry. Concerts and pageants may sell separate tickets — check the festival site. What you do need to book is a bed. Portland has almost no lodging of its own, so the nearest rooms are the White House cluster 11 miles south at I-65 exit 108 — Hampton Inn White House, Holiday Inn Express White House by IHG, Comfort Inn White House, Quality Inn White House and Motel 6 White House TN — or Springfield, 21 miles west, with Hampton Inn by Hilton Springfield and Holiday Inn Express & Suites Nashville North Springfield by IHG. Book three months ahead.
Free peripheral lots with a shuttle downtown. Central parking is closed to traffic during festival hours. There is no bus, train or fixed-route transit serving Portland, so the shuttle stop is effectively your nearest station — drive in and ride the last mile. From Springfield take TN-76 East, roughly 21 miles and 30 minutes, or 45 on Saturday morning. From the interstate use I-65 exit 117 (TN-52) and head two miles west. Arrive before 9am on parade day; the closest lots fill first and turn soft after rain.
Every booking through Springfield Destinations funds one verified tonne of carbon removal — same room, same price, no markup.
Find a stay