East Cobber Parade and Festival: What Changed This Year

"I wanted to bring a sense of 'place' to our community."

That's how Cynthia Rozzo described her reason for starting a neighborhood parade back in 1995, two years after she launched East Cobber magazine to give a fast-growing suburb something to rally around. She had no children of her own yet. She just wanted a tradition kids growing up on Johnson Ferry Road would remember. Five hundred people showed up that first year to march the route.

This year, on Saturday, October 3, the East Cobber Parade & Festival returns for its 28th edition. The parade itself has barely budged in three decades: same street, same staging point, same candy-throwing chaos. The festival that follows it has. If you've pulled up an old listing page to plan your Saturday, the hours you're reading are probably wrong.

Thirty-One Years, Twenty-Eight Parades

The math doesn't quite add up, and that's worth explaining before anything else. Rozzo founded the event in 1995. COVID forced a hiatus that stretched roughly four years, wiping out the run somewhere around 2020. When the parade came back in 2023 under new owner Laren Brown, who had spent eight years as the magazine's community marketing executive before buying it from Rozzo, organizers called it the 25th rendition, not the 28th. The counting picked up where it left off, skipped years and all.

That first comeback year fell short of what organizers hoped for. Ahead of the 25th, promotional materials projected more than 2,000 marchers and 10,000 spectators, the kind of turnout the parade had built before the pandemic. What actually showed up, according to East Cobb News, was an estimated 1,000 participants. By the 26th, in 2024, around 60 local groups marched, from Walton High School's band to the Twilight Twirlers. By the 27th, in September 2025, the Marietta Daily Journal put combined parade and festival attendance back near 10,000, based on a police estimate. The event rebuilt itself over three editions, not all at once.

None of that rebuilding touched the route or the ritual. What changed, and what most of the pages you'll find when you search for this event still haven't caught up to, is how long the festival itself runs.

What's Actually Different This Year

For years, the pattern was consistent: parade at 10 a.m., festival from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. That four-hour window shows up on the event's own listing pages, on neighborhood association calendars, and on family-events sites that have been recycling the same copy since at least 2023. It was true for the 25th anniversary. It was still being quoted for what was billed as the 2026 event page as recently as this summer.

But the freshest confirmation of this year's actual schedule, published by East Cobb Beacon in mid-August, puts the festival at 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., not 3. That's an hour shorter than the version most locals have in their heads from prior years. The parade start time hasn't moved. The festival that follows it has been trimmed.

It's a small change, and it may not stay that way in future years. But if you're the kind of household that shows up for the parade, grabs lunch, and lingers at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church until midafternoon, this year rewards getting there earlier rather than later. Carnival games and face painting that used to have a three-hour runway now have two.

The Route That Hasn't Moved

The parade itself starts outside Mt. Bethel Elementary School, at the Princeton Lakes subdivision entrance on Johnson Ferry Road, and travels a mile south to end near Olde Towne Parkway. It's the same stretch it's always run, and it's earned its nickname honestly. Floats and marching bands toss candy the entire way, which is why almost everyone who covers the event, from the local paper to parent bloggers, calls it the candy parade.

The lineup leans hard into East Cobb's own institutions. Unicyclists from Mt. Bethel Elementary pedal the route most years. High school marching bands, Walton's and Wheeler's among them, have both turned out. Librarians push book carts from the Cobb County Public Library System. Scout troops, cheer squads, and elected officials walk alongside them. One tradition organizer Laren Brown says is her favorite: participants stop along the way at nursing homes so residents can watch from their chairs and wave.

"The kids grow up and change, but the festival is still the same."

That's Brown's own summary of what three decades have and haven't done to the event. The parking lot games change hands sponsor to sponsor. Past editions have carried the name of local businesses like CertaPro Painters up front. But the shape of the day, march down Johnson Ferry, land at the church, stay for cotton candy and a bounce house, hasn't moved.

Planning Around It

A few things worth knowing if you live along or near the route:

• Parade start: 10 a.m., staging at Mt. Bethel Elementary near the Princeton Lakes entrance on Johnson Ferry Road
• Festival window: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. this year at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, an hour shorter than the 11 to 3 window locals may remember from recent editions
• Road impact: In past years, Cobb Police have closed a stretch of Johnson Ferry Road for roughly ninety minutes around the parade, with detours routed through Indian Hills Parkway and Timber Ridge Road at their intersections with both Roswell Road and Lower Roswell Road
• Parking: Available in the shopping centers along the parade route
• Cost: Free to attend, and funded entirely through event fees and business sponsorships rather than city or county budget dollars

That last point surprises some newer residents. This isn't a Cobb County program. It's a magazine publisher's community event, self-funded through the same local businesses that show up in the festival's vendor booths every year, from jewelry sellers to martial arts studios to the local school groups the parade was built to honor in the first place.

A Habit, Not a Headline

What makes the East Cobber Parade worth writing about isn't scale. Ten thousand people is a good Saturday, not a record-setter. What makes it worth knowing is how little it asks of a neighborhood to keep something like this alive for 31 years, hiatus and ownership change included. A magazine editor with no kids yet decided East Cobb needed a hometown parade. A woman who used to sell ads for that same magazine decided it was worth buying and keeping running.

One parade-goer, watching her granddaughter wait for candy at a recent festival, put it simply:

"I think it's very important for people to get to meet their neighbors and share a good time."

That's not a pitch. It's just what a lot of people who've lived here for years already believe about the place, said out loud on a Saturday in October.

If this is the kind of neighborhood detail that makes you curious what else is changing around East Cobb, or what your own home might be worth in a market that's still shifting month to month, the team at Rich & Heather Homes lives and works right here too. They offer a free home valuation for anyone who wants a real answer instead of a guess, no parade required.