Loxley’s long-running spring tradition returns this weekend, with the 28th annual Baldwin County Strawberry Festival set for Saturday and Sunday at Loxley Municipal Park. Admission is free, and the two-day festival includes arts and crafts vendors, live music, an antique car show, more than a dozen food vendors and a carnival for kids, making it one of the most family-friendly stops on Baldwin County’s spring calendar.
The festivities are presided over by the newly crowned Little Miss Strawberry and her court, a tradition that has followed the festival for years. Entertainment runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, giving visitors a full weekend window to catch the music lineup, browse the vendor booths and tour the rows of classic cars without paying a cent at the gate.
Strawberries are more than a theme in this part of Alabama — they are an agricultural inheritance. Baldwin County’s sandy loam soil and mild winters made it one of the South’s premier strawberry-growing regions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when berries shipped by rail from farms around Loxley, Robertsdale and Silverhill reached markets across the region. The crop gave the county its spring identity, and the festival, now in its 28th year, keeps that heritage in front of new generations of residents who know Loxley primarily as an Interstate 10 exit.
That heritage is visible all over town. Strawberry imagery marks local signage, local farms still sell berries roadside each spring, and the annual festival turns the harvest season into a community celebration that draws visitors from across the Mobile Bay area. For many families, the weekend has become a standing spring ritual: same park, same weekend, new memories each year.
Unlike many regional festivals that charge for parking on top of admission, the Loxley event keeps both free, a deliberate choice organizers have maintained across nearly three decades. The result is a crowd that skews local and multigenerational — grandparents pushing strollers, teenagers working the carnival midway, church groups claiming shade under the park’s trees — rather than the tourist traffic that defines the county’s beach communities down the road.
Proceeds from the festival benefit Loxley Elementary School and the Association of Retarded Citizens of Baldwin County, directing the event’s vendor fees and fundraising toward classroom needs and services for residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The dual beneficiaries reflect the festival’s original purpose as a school-support fundraiser that grew into one of the county’s signature spring events.
Festival organizers post the full schedule, including the live music lineup, at the event’s website, along with information on how to enter the Little Miss Strawberry pageant. Visitors planning a weekend trip are advised to arrive early: parking around Loxley Municipal Park fills quickly on Saturday mornings, and the most popular food vendors routinely draw lines by late morning.
More on the spring calendar
Strawberry season isn’t the only thing drawing crowds this month. St. Mary Catholic School’s Knights of Columbus Crawfish and Bluegrass Extravaganza returns for another year on a Saturday later in April, running from 4 to 9 p.m. at St. Mary Catholic School, turning a school campus into one of the area’s liveliest springtime gatherings.
The event typically serves thousands of pounds of crawfish alongside a bluegrass lineup, gumbo, hot dogs, Cammie’s Old Dutch Ice Cream and beer from Fairhope Brewing Company. The mix of boiled seafood and live bluegrass has made the extravaganza a favorite for families and music fans alike, with seating spread across the school grounds and serving lines that move steadily through the evening.
Organizers are collecting canned goods for the Bay Area Food Bank, and proceeds benefit Catholic Social Services’ “Legacy for the Future” program. The charitable hook runs through both the food drive and the ticket proceeds, tying the evening’s celebration to year-round assistance for families across the greater Mobile area. Knights of Columbus councils across the Gulf Coast build their calendars around events of this kind, pairing a shared meal with a fundraising purpose and giving parish communities a reason to gather outside Sunday services. The crawfish boil format has proven especially durable: it scales easily, it celebrates a Gulf Coast staple, and it draws an audience well beyond the parish membership.
Tickets run $25 in advance and $30 at the gate, with discounted rates for high school students and free admission for kids 12 and under. The pricing structure keeps the event accessible for large families, and advance purchases save regulars a few dollars while helping organizers estimate crawfish orders before the boiling begins.
USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital is holding its second annual Local Goodness fundraiser the following Sunday, a farm-to-table event at the Alabama Cruise Terminal featuring local chefs, seafood, meats, produce, art and live music. The cruise terminal setting puts the event on the Mobile River waterfront, with a menu built almost entirely from Gulf-sourced ingredients and dishes prepared by chefs from across the region.
Tickets are $150 per person, with proceeds supporting healthcare for women and children across the region. The hospital, located on the USA campus in Mobile, serves as the Gulf Coast’s specialized provider for high-risk maternity care, neonatal intensive care and pediatric services, and fundraising events like Local Goodness help underwrite programs and equipment that patient revenue alone does not cover.
Also on the calendar: a wine dinner at Zea’s featuring the wines of French distributor Jean Francois Christini, paired with a four-course meal, giving diners a guided tour of French wine regions without leaving the Eastern Shore. Wine dinners of this kind pair each course with a selected label, typically with a representative on hand to walk guests through the pairings, and they have become a staple of restaurant fundraising across the region. For restaurants, the evenings showcase kitchen range; for distributors, they put lesser-known wines in front of diners who might not order them from a list; for guests, they offer an educational night out that supports a cause in the process.
And St. Mary’s annual Casino Night fundraiser returns this year with an “An Evening in Paris” theme, benefiting St. Mary’s Catholic School. The themed evening of games and socializing rounds out a spring calendar packed with school-support fundraisers, hospital galas and community festivals across the two-county region.
Why the spring calendar matters
Spring is the crowded season on the Alabama Gulf Coast for good reason. The weather is at its most comfortable, school calendars leave weekends open for family events, and the region’s farms, kitchens and music venues all have their best offerings on display at once. Festivals like the one in Loxley anchor the season, but the weeks around them brim with smaller gatherings that keep local dollars circulating in the community.
Fall festivals, fish fries and spring pageants form the quiet infrastructure of Gulf Coast civic life. The people who run them are volunteers — parents, parishioners, hospital auxiliaries — and the money they raise covers the gap between what public funding and tuition provide and what schools and charities actually need. The spring calendar that starts with strawberries in Loxley and winds through crawfish boils and wine dinners is, in effect, the region’s annual pass-the-hat, and it has worked for decades.
The fundraising mechanics matter as much as the fun. Events like the Strawberry Festival, the Crawfish and Bluegrass Extravaganza and Local Goodness operate on a simple model: volunteers and sponsors absorb the costs, attendees buy food, tickets and raffle chances, and the surplus flows to schools and charities that serve Baldwin and Mobile counties year-round. A single well-attended weekend can fund school technology, disability services and patient-care programs long after the last food booth has folded.
The compact footprint also keeps travel simple. Baldwin County’s park network and municipal event calendars fill every spring weekend from March through May, and the short drives between towns — Loxley to Robertsdale, Fairhope to Foley — let families string together two or three events in a single day. The strawberry festival sits at the center of that circuit, timed each year to the height of the berry harvest.
For Loxley, the festival is also a statement about the town’s place in the county. Positioned along the Interstate 10 corridor between Mobile and the beach communities, the town has grown rapidly in recent decades, and the annual festival reminds newcomers of the agricultural roots beneath the subdivisions. The Little Miss Strawberry pageant, the antique cars and the school-based beneficiaries all point back to a community organized around its families and its fields.
Weather is the one variable no organizer controls, and spring weekends along the Gulf Coast can swing from perfect to stormy within hours. Festival veterans plan accordingly: sunscreen and water bottles for the warm afternoons, and a mental note of the radar for the pop-up showers that occasionally move through. Organizers monitor conditions through the weekend and post updates through the event’s website and social channels if any part of the schedule has to shift.
This weekend’s festival runs Saturday and Sunday at Loxley Municipal Park, with entertainment from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days and free admission throughout. Visitors can find the complete music schedule, vendor listings and pageant information on the festival’s website, and organizers encourage guests to bring the whole family — and to come hungry, because in the strawberry capital of Baldwin County, spring is served all weekend long.