POTTSTOWN PA – “A full day of throwback fun, hometown pride, and fireworks that’ll light up the sky like it’s 1985” await visitors Friday (July 4, 2025) in the borough’s Memorial Park, 75 W. King St., as they attend the Pottstown GoFourth! Festival ’25. The fun runs from 3-9:30 p.m., and admission is free.
The GoFourth Festival team, in a Wednesday (July 2) e-mail, proudly lists all the entertainment, food, and activities it has planned for the afternoon and evening at the park. However, it also notes the borough’s Independence Day festivities really begin much sooner.
Photo by yirsh on Freeimages.com
A Big Parade Kick-Off
The annual Fourth of July parade will start to roll down East High Street at 10:15 a.m. from Adams Street near the Pottstown Post Office. It then continues west toward Manatawny Street.
Parade participants will include mainstays such as the Pottstown Rotary Club’s 16-foot-high inflated yellow duck; several bands, musicians, and other performers, veterans’ groups, and many local organizations. Anticipate that fire trucks, community spirit, and stars-n-stripes will be working “full blast,” the festival team reports.
Pottstown-based STCNtech is the parade sponsor, assisted by the festival team and the Rotary Club.
Memorial Park as ‘Festival Playground’
Memorial Park transforms at 3 p.m. into a festival playground. It features:
- Food trucks and a beer garden, “because freedom tastes better with fries,” according to the festival team;
- Face painting, inflatables, and Grandpop Bubbles to entertain kids and grown-ups alike;
- Colonial-style time travel, to introduce some very historic important persons;
- Tethered hot air balloon rides, but only for those age 12 and older; and
- The iconic (and “quacktastic,” the team claims) Rotary Duck Race at 5 p.m.
ROG Orthodontics and the law firm of Fox Rothschild LLP are this year’s Kids’ Zone sponsors.
Music? Yeah, GoFourth’s Got That
The festival offers no-cover-cost music throughout its entire run. Scheduled to perform are:
- Conga-powered party starters Hector Rosado y Orchestra Haché, from 4-5:15 p.m.;
- The James Daniels Band, courtesy of the Pottstown Parks and Recreation Department, from 5:45-7 p.m.;
- Modern Luxe, with a performance in which retro glam meets modern jam, from 7:30-9:15 p.m.; and
- Fueling the sounds will be a sound recording and technology crew provided by Montgomery County Community College. The festival team explains that its “no static, no stress—just pro-level audio flows smoother than the Schuylkill on a summer morning.”
“Whether you’re chasing bubbles or chasing beats, GoFourth brings the stoke for every generation of party people,” it adds. Pottstown’s Switchpoint Foundation is the festival music sponsor.
A Spectacular Fireworks Finale
The festival’s fireworks extravaganza starts in the park at 9:30 p.m. It’s sponsored by Precision Polymer Products of Pottstown, and the festival team says the show is “guaranteed to blow your tube socks off.”
Additional GoFourth Sponsors
Also providing sponsorships to make the festival a success are the Pottstown Area Health and Wellness Foundation, for Drones And Digital Media; the law firm of Wolf Baldwin & Associates, for Squad Swag; Fast Signs of Pottstown and PECO, as Gold Sponsors; and Montgomery County Community College, Tompkins, Xfinity, the law firm of O’Donnell, Weiss & Mattei P.C., Key Bank, and Pottstown Hospital-Tower Health, as Silver Sponsors.
Don’t Worry; The Park Will Be Great
It also acknowledges what team members describe as “the soggy elephant in the park.” Memorial Park “has been swimming in a little more water than we’d like lately,” they say, as a result of recent rainstorms.
With help from “the amazing team at Pottstown Parks and Recreation,” the festival teams is collectively rolling up its sleeves “and doing everything we can to get the park festival-ready. Once the water recedes, it’s full steam ahead.” The muck will be cleared out, rough things smoothed over, and the grounds will be fest-ready by the big day.
Public mojo can provide a big boost, too. “Light some candles, cross your fingers, and bribe the weather gods with a sparkler, a lawn chair, a Very Best hot dog with chili sauce (of course), and offer a Rotary Duck Race rubber ducky at sunrise,” the festival team suggests.
Photos by Travels With The Post
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