The Oldest Outdoor Crafts Market in the Country
Near Eugene, Oregon
On May ninth, nineteen seventy, twenty-nine vendors set up tables on a city parking lot in downtown Eugene. It rained all day. The vendors stayed, and when the following Saturday came, more of them came back. The Eugene Saturday Market had opened.
It was founded by a woman named Lotte Streisinger, an artist and community organizer whose husband was a prominent biologist at the University of Oregon. Her intention was direct: create a space where people who made things by hand could sell them directly to people who wanted to buy things made by hand, without a gallery or a retailer in between. Each vendor paid one dollar for a table. The city owned the parking lot and was skeptical at first. The city council eventually decided to let the market continue.
The market moved to its present location at Oak and Eighth Avenue in April of nineteen eighty-three, a two-block park with a central fountain and enough space for a hundred vendors or more.
It is now described as the oldest continuously operating outdoor crafts market in the United States. That distinction is specific and earned: not a farmers market, not a flea market, but a handmade crafts market, open every Saturday from April through November, for more than fifty consecutive years. The vendors must make what they sell. The founding rule, articulated in nineteen seventy in a parking lot in the rain, has not changed.
