Blossomtime started with a sermon about fruit trees

It started from a pulpit. In 1906 the Reverend W. J. Cady of the First Congregational Church in Benton Harbor told his parishioners to get out and drive through the fruit orchards while the trees were in bloom — he called the blossoms symbols of life renewed. That sermon is the seed everyone points to for the Blossomtime Festival, which grew into a yearly celebration of the fruit country that rings Benton Harbor and St. Joseph each spring.

The festival’s centerpiece came later. In the early 1920s a local fruit processor named Fred Granger and the Reverend Joshua Randall hatched the idea of a floral parade to show off the area’s growing businesses, and the first Grand Floral Parade rolled out on May 14, 1924, with thirty floats, a couple of marching bands, and a long tail of private automobiles. Catherine Burrell of Benton Harbor was crowned the first Blossomtime Queen that same year, chosen by ballots clipped from the newspaper.

A century on, the parade still does the one thing that makes it distinctive: it starts in St. Joseph, winds through that city, then crosses the bridge over the St. Joseph River and finishes in Benton Harbor. Two cities, one parade, marching across the water between them — which is part of why the festival bills itself as the oldest and largest multi-community festival in Michigan, drawing dozens of communities that each send their own royalty and floats.

If you want the real flavor, skip the floats for a minute and watch the crowd. Whole families stake out the curb on the bridge approach with lawn chairs and coolers, and the marching bands hit the rise over the river just as the lake wind comes up off Lake Michigan and sets every float’s crepe-paper blossoms shaking.