Burlington’s Carousel Festival returns with music, food and family fun

Burlington’s Carousel Festival again put City Park at the center of civic life, using the city’s restored Dentzel Carousel as both the headline attraction and a reminder of how the park connects generations in Alamance County. The 35th annual festival was set for Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, May 3, from noon to 5 p.m., bringing live music, performances, an artisan alley with more than 70 local crafters, food trucks, a Kids Zone and amusement rides into Burlington’s flagship park.

That mix gave the event its local pull. Families could spend the day moving between the carousel, food vendors and music stages, while shoppers browsed handmade goods from area crafters and children had a dedicated play space. The festival worked as more than a weekend carnival: it served as a public gathering built around local business, arts and recreation, with the restored carousel giving the celebration a distinctive Burlington identity that no other Alamance County event can quite match.

The centerpiece is the Burlington City Park Carousel, a 3-row Dentzel menagerie carousel built around 1906 to 1910 at the Dentzel Carousel Company in Philadelphia. Burlington bought it in the summer of 1948 from Carl Utoff, who owned Forest Park Amusement Park in Genoa, Ohio. The carousel later went through a major restoration from 2019 to 2022, and the city also built a new carousel house to protect it.

That new house was placed on higher ground closer to Main Street, keeping the carousel out of the creek floodplain while improving ADA accessibility. Local reporting said the new building cost almost $3 million, a scale that reflected the city’s commitment to preserving one of its best-known landmarks. Burlington says the carousel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the city’s historic-preservation pages list the Dentzel Menagerie Carousel as a local historic landmark.

City Park itself spans more than 75 acres and stands as the flagship of the Burlington Parks System, with the carousel at its center. The restored ride returned to City Park in 2022 after more than three years away, and the festival has since continued to build around it. After 34th annual festivities in 2025, Burlington’s 35th celebration showed how a single restored attraction can still shape civic memory, public space and the city’s sense of itself.