The Olympia Farmers Market: Second Largest in the State

Thursday mornings in Olympia, starting in April, the stalls along Capitol Way North fill up with growers, bakers, cheesemakers, flower farmers, fishers, and craftspeople. The Olympia Farmers Market has been operating in downtown Olympia since nineteen seventy-five, though its roots go back further. There was a market here in the nineteen thirties that faded after the war as new health regulations, declining farm numbers, and the rise of supermarkets drew people away from direct commerce with producers.

The market that reopened in nineteen seventy-five was built on a different model. It is vendor-operated, meaning the vendors themselves govern it, set its rules, and decide what it becomes. That structure has held for fifty years. The market now receives an estimated four hundred thousand visitors per year. It operates year-round, with Saturdays available in every month, and expands to Thursday through Sunday during the high season from April through October.

By any measure of size, it is the second-largest farmers market in Washington State, after Seattle. What that means practically is that on a spring morning, when the weather in the Pacific Northwest occasionally cooperates, the market on the Olympia waterfront is one of the more fully realized versions of what a public market can be, dense with product, dense with people who know each other, operating with a transparency about where food comes from that most American retail has systematically obscured.

It has been doing this in downtown Olympia, in the same basic form, since the mid-nineteen seventies. That is a long run for anything in a small city.