Cherry Festival

Front Street to the schoolyard

At ten in the morning on the third Saturday in May, a parade sets out from the corner of Front and Market Streets in Linden and covers eight to ten blocks to the grounds of Linden Elementary School at 18100 E. Front Street. Preschoolers take part, pulling decorated wagons, and the Cherry Queen and her court appear in the line. Abigail Samuel, queen in 2025, was once one of the wagon children: “When we were in preschool we would be in the little parade with our decorated wagons, and I’d always see the cherry queen in her court lined up and I was like, ‘that’s what I want to do one day.’”

Linden is an unincorporated farm town in San Joaquin County, on California Highway 26. The 2010 count put its population at 1,784 over 7.5 square miles. Row crops, vineyards, orchards, and livestock surround it, and the Linden-Peters Chamber of Commerce, which directs the festival, calls the district the “Most Diversified Agricultural District in the World.” The chamber writes that the town is known for walnuts and cherries, and that it identifies so closely with the cherries that it gives them a festival. Admission is free. Accounts of the 2023 and 2025 festivals give the hours as 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The 2026 festival was held May 16 under the theme “Linden Cherries, Red, Ripe, and Rooted.” Vic Solari, the chamber president, addressed one invitation to the nearest city: “If people from Stockton want to see what it’s like out in the country? Come on in.”

The schoolyard holds carnival rides, games, vendor booths, and a classic car show. The car show sits on the school lawn instead of a parking lot. Solari says owners and admirers both appreciate the grass, and by one 2023 account the show drew more than 125 entries the year before.

Sausages, tacos, and a cow on a grid

Some of the food changes from year to year, but HERLIFE Magazine reported in 2023 that the Linden-Peters Fire Department booth always grills sausages. Holy Cross Catholic Church makes street tacos. The FFA booth sells tri-tip sandwiches prepared by the Lions Club, and the FFA also keeps a large booth of plants its members propagated and grew at the Linden High School Agricultural Department. Fresh local cherries are for sale, along with cherry pies and, in 2024, cherry ice cream. Cooks also compete in a bake-off for the best cherry treat.

The pies come back in the cherry pie eating contest. “The contest is hilarious, and the crowd goes wild,” Solari said. “One year, Good Day Sacramento came to do a piece on that.” The FFA runs a cow plop contest, which Solari describes as a game of chance decided by which square a cow chooses to do its “business” in. “It may not sound pretty, but it’s a lot of fun,” he said.

Live music plays through the afternoon. In 2024 there were three bands: Acoustic Measures, The Nick-Elwood Band, and the Valley Grove Band. Accounts of other years list choirs, magicians, the Linden High School cheer squad and show choir, and a demonstration by the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department K9 unit. Students also enter a poster contest tied to the festival.

The day also raises money. Solari said the chamber, the school, and community organizations all fundraise at the festival. Julie Wright, who has helped organize it for the chamber, described the arrangement with the students: “A lot of the kids come and they come help set up, they come do things, and then a lot of us give them a certain percentage of our gross income to them as a fundraiser for them, so they are able to, do things over the school year.”

Seven juniors and a crown

The queen is chosen before the festival. In February 2026 the chamber named seven high school juniors as princesses: Audrey Bianchi, Andrea Nava, Emily Celli, Isabella Tracy, Kailye Castro Guzman, Molly Laires, and Gabriella Garcia-Cisneros. The contest judges interview skills, poise, public speaking, and dedication to promoting Linden’s cherry and agricultural industry. That spring the princesses met the public on evenings at DeVinci’s Delicatessen in Linden, where visitors took pictures with them and ate ravioli. The contest, luncheon, and crowning were first announced for May 2. The chamber then moved them to noon on Saturday, May 9, 2026, at the Linden First Baptist Church. By late May the chamber’s page was calling Molly Laires the Linden Cherry Festival Queen, and it invited the town to join her and Linden Little League at a Stockton Ports game on July 11.

Earlier queens followed the same path. Elina Barbagelata, a Linden High School junior, was crowned in 2024 from a field of eight. Samuel took the title in 2025, a year when the crop came in short.

A short crop in 2025

According to the 209 Magazine, Linden’s cherries go back to the late 1800s. The town’s early farmers then turned from wheat to vegetables and to fruit and nut trees, and walnuts and cherries came to cover the most acreage. In 2024 Solari called the area “one of the major suppliers of cherries in the country if not a lot of the world.”

In 2025 the weather damaged the crop. San Joaquin County officials asked the state for a disaster declaration and put the county’s economic loss at $100 million. KCRA reported that many growers pooled their cherries so the festival could go on. “It’s a very sensitive crop, you know?” Wright said. “So sometimes we do good, sometimes we do bad, but in the long run, cherries are like Linden. We’re very strong, very rooted and we come back every year with a vengeance.” Visitors who wanted to pick cherries off the trees that year were sent down the street to Machado Family Farms. For 2026 the chamber posted that fresh cherries “WILL be available at the festival.”

The festival has had its own interruptions. After a pause for the pandemic it returned under the theme “Unmask the Sweetness.” In 2023 it honored Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees outfielder raised in Linden and a 2010 graduate of Linden High School, with the theme “Linden Cherries are Legendary…just like #99 Aaron Judge.” In 2024 the theme was “Linden Cherries Salutes the U.S. Military.”

From Community Day to cherries

The two published accounts of the festival’s beginning differ in their detail. Solari told The Stockton Record that it began in 1939 as Linden Community Day, put on by the Linden Union High School Future Farmers of America, and that the chamber took it over in 1973, when it became the Linden Cherry Festival. Research by the Linden Historical Society, as reported by 209 Magazine, traces it to the Linden Future Farmers Community Day Fair. That fair was mainly a school activity until the town began to think of it as a community-wide event. The chamber became involved, and in 1973 the newly named Linden Cherry Festival was held. The queen, the cherry bake-off, and the cherry pie eating contest all continue from those early years.

Solari saw the change from inside. He was president of the FFA in the early 1970s, when the event was still called the Linden Community Day Fair. He later served almost 40 years with the Linden-Peters Fire Department, became president of the chamber, and chaired the festival. He remembers that in his high school years there were no vendor booths, no outside vendors, and no car show, which he now calls “a huge draw to bring people in.”