Bordentown’s Cranberry Festival Turns Farnsworth Avenue Into One Long Gallery

Some towns throw a festival. Bordentown throws open its whole main street and tells the artists to make themselves at home.

This weekend marks the 36th Annual Cranberry Festival of Fine Arts and Crafts, and that word — fine arts — is the part people tend to skip over when they hear “fall festival.” Don’t. Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, Farnsworth Avenue in downtown Bordentown City closes to cars and fills instead with more than 100 juried artists and crafters: painters and potters, woodworkers and jewelers, the glassblowers and leatherworkers and printmakers who spend most of the year hunched over a bench somewhere and emerge, blinking, for one perfect autumn weekend to sell the thing they actually made with their hands.

Why juried matters

That jury process is why this one is worth the drive. “Juried” means someone looked at the work and said yes, this belongs — so you are not wading through a parking lot of mass-produced tchotchkes to find the real stuff. The real stuff is the whole event. You can talk to the person who threw the bowl you are holding. You can watch somebody demonstrate a craft their grandfather taught them. There is live music threading down the avenue, food worth standing in line for, and a beer garden for when your feet need a minute. The Downtown Bordentown Association, which runs the whole thing, keeps parking free and lays on a shuttle, which tells you everything about who this festival is really for — the people, not the logistics.

Thirty-six years on

Thirty-six years is no small thing for a community arts event. Festivals like this live and die on volunteers and stubborn local pride, and Bordentown has kept this one alive through recessions, reinventions, and more than one rainy October. That longevity is its own kind of art.

You are taking home a piece of somebody’s year.Jenna Joy

And it is not the only reason to get out this weekend. South Jersey’s festival season hits full stride over the next two days — there is a certain pumpkin-centered Sunday happening over in Blackwood that my colleague will tell you about — but if you want the weekend that rewards slowing down, point the car toward Bordentown. Bring cash, bring an empty tote bag, and leave room in the budget to come home with something that no one else will have. That is the quiet magic of a juried show: you are not buying a product. You are taking home a piece of somebody’s year.

Based on reporting from PhillyVoice, TAPinto Bordentown and the Downtown Bordentown Association.