Broad Street Market: One Hundred and Sixty Years of Farmers
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The stone building at the corner of Third and Verbeke streets has been selling produce, meat, and cheese since eighteen sixty-three. That makes the Broad Street Market one of the oldest continuously operating farmers markets in the United States, and the older of its two stone buildings is among the oldest remaining market houses in the country still used for its original purpose.
The story begins in April eighteen sixty, when a man named William Verbeke drew up papers to incorporate the West Harrisburg Market Company. He and a group of local investors believed that Midtown Harrisburg, then growing rapidly as an immigrant and working-class neighborhood tied to the new railroads and factories, needed a proper public market. The stone building opened in eighteen sixty-three, followed by the brick building between eighteen seventy-four and eighteen seventy-eight.
The timing placed the market at the center of the Civil War's supply demands. Camp Curtin, the massive Union training camp a mile to the north, required staggering quantities of food. Local farmers who had been selling a wagon of goods at a time now scaled up to feed an encampment of tens of thousands.
The market survived the railroad age, survived both world wars, and survived the slow disinvestment that hollowed out much of Harrisburg's Midtown in the postwar decades. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. In nineteen ninety-six the city completed a two-and-a-half-million-dollar restoration of the complex.
Today the stalls carry the same general inventory they always have, plus a rotating cast of specialty vendors, food trucks, and artisans. The stone walls are the same walls. The light comes through the same windows. It is the kind of institution that a city forgets to appreciate precisely because it has always been there.
