Eugene Saturday Market will be entering its 55th season on Saturday, April 6. The history of the oldest open air crafts market in the country begins on “the butterfly lot” in the Eugene Town Square, where it debuted in 1970.
“It wasn’t an ideal space for Saturday Market, but it was the only thing that the county would let us use at the time,” Diane McWhorter, a Saturday Market vendor and board secretary, said.
McWhorter taught herself how to screen 50 years ago through books at the library. Her first screen printed products were t-shirts, but she has since stopped selling tees at the saturday market. She now sells hats and tote bags.
Eugene Saturday Market moved on from the butterfly lot after the 1982 season, which has since been demolished to make space for the new Town Square. It now occupies the East and West lot of Hitching Post Square — better known as the Park Blocks.
The move occurred after the market closed in November of that season, just six months after an arsonist set fire to the butterfly lot.
“That following week, everybody kind of joined together and started pitching in to see if we would not have to miss any markets,” McWhorter said. “We showed up and since I painted signs, I thought, well, I’ll just paint a lot of new signs.”
McWhorter started selling at the market in 1976, just six years after the market’s inaugural season. In 1995, McWhorter took a 12-year break from Eugene Saturday Market to remodel her home. She remained an active member at the time selling at the Holiday Market. A former sign painter, she said she became a screen printer for t-shirts when they were “not really a fashion item.”
“This is a membership-based organization. A lot of the work that’s done is all volunteer work, so these people that have been here since the seventies are very vital to how we run today,” Sonia Ostendorf, the market’s membership coordinator, said.
Ostendorf grew up going to farmers’ markets with her parents and started working at the Eugene Saturday Market info booth in 2019. She said out of the roughly 300 active members, there are around ten that have been around since the 1970s. Many of the older members take breaks or move on from the market while others get drawn back.
“A lot of people will travel the world and say, ‘I’ve never had such an amazing selling experience anywhere else. This is something truly unique,’” Ostendorf said. “I’m always happy when somebody grows up and grows out of us because it just opens the door for more people to come in.”
Shannon Lee-Hutson, a former board chair, has been a vendor since 2016, selling jewelry under her business iQueen Creations. In 2022, she took over as interim general manager before coming back to take on the full position for the 2023 season. Her personal philosophy is making the market as smooth as possible for the vendors and customers.
“The vendors come in on Saturday, they come in fairly early. They bring all their things for that day. They have to unpack and unload. So by the time they get here, I want it to be like magic,” she said. “Last year during the construction, it was very difficult because that magic was tarnished a bit.”
Vendors, organizers and customers alike are all looking forward to a construction-free Saturday Market.
Lee-Hutson has several plans for the current market and future ones. One plan coming to fruition this season is bringing back the much-missed fork program in 2024. The program offers customers reusable silverware that can be deposited in return boxes around the Park Blocks. It will be returning for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the safety risks of this program too high.
Another exciting prospect about the 2024 market season is its new translation project. Lee-Hutson said she feels like the Spanish-speaking community in Eugene does not have the same options for translations as they might in her hometown of California. The first step of the project was translating informational materials available to members of the Saturday Market, but the new translated materials have yet to be put up.
“I’m really excited about that,” Lee-Hutson said. “I would like to officially encourage and invite the Spanish-speaking community to join our market.”
There are three options available to vendors at the Saturday Market: 4×4 stalls, 8x8s and strolling. Longtime members get more of a choice for their stall, while new members get the last pick of the litter.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that truthfully is what applies to booths. I will have one person come up to me and I’ll offer them a booth, they’ll say, ‘That’s the worst booth in the world,’” Ostendorf said. “And the next person will come up and say, ‘That’s my favorite booth, I can’t wait.’ So there’s a lot of feng shui that goes along with it.”
Members pay an annual fee of $60. 4×4 stalls go for $8 a day and 10% of the day’s sales and an 8×8 is $15 a day and 10% of sales.
Many of the market’s members and employees have been attending the market since childhood. While nostalgia might be a driving force for many people’s interest, the community is what seems to bring people back.
“I’ve been shopping at Saturday Market with my family since I was in middle school, so it was really fun to kind of see the behind the scenes of how the market is put together,” marketing manager Renee Thompson said.
Thompson is entering her third year working for the Saturday Market. She started as its marketing assistant before moving her way up.
“We have a really nice mix of what I like to call emerging artists and established artists,” Thompson said. Two of the artists that represent this dichotomy well are McWhorter and Dara Robertson.
Dara Robertson was a hairstylist in Bend, Ore., for 25 years before moving to Eugene. She joined the Eugene Saturday Market during its 2023 season and operates under the name Fringe Art Collective with her husband and child.
“Growing up in the high desert over in Bend, I always thought that I had a black thumb and I couldn’t really keep plants alive,” Robertson said. “But it was just that I’d lived in the wrong city. So coming here, plants and I have become way better friends.”
Robertson makes around 40 types of different paper flowers. Recently she started making figurines out of clay to hold the bouquets she creates.
“I hand cut each one and assemble them with wire and glue,” Roberston said. “I put them in little microscopic glass vases and the entire bouquet is less than three inches tall when it’s done.
Through its 55 seasons, the Eugene Saturday Market has remained artist-oriented and anti-mass production. Every vendor at the market has to go through an approval process from the standards committee to ensure their products are entirely self-made and original. Artists must also be present during the market.
“You’re not allowed to hole away in your studio and pay someone to run your booth. It’s very much a more intimate endeavor,” Thompson said. Of course, many artists will have family members help them out when business gets busy.
Promoting artist originality and evolving the standards committee has been difficult for the market employees to work around in the digital age — especially with AI art.
“How do we adjust to AI art? We don’t,” Lee-Hutson said. “We have said, ‘Sorry, at this time we can’t do AI art because we don’t have enough information to create a standard.’”
She said recently, someone failed the approval process because they were using a non-original design for their crafts. Once they modified their products to be based on their own designs, they were allowed to start selling again.
“It could have been terrible,” Lee-Hutson said. “And yet, here she was, inspired now to do new things.”
While the market is dedicated to the artists, the artists are equally dedicated to showing up rain or shine, an unofficial motto of the market.
“I think it’s really very interesting to see the spirit of human artistry,” Thompson said. “And making sure that we don’t lose out on those arts that have been existent in our society for hundreds if not thousands of years.”
McWhorter has a custom bike trailer made by Eugene brand Human Powered Machines that she uses to carry her art to the market every Saturday.
“I’ve been using that since 2009 and I just feel like, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it, but I’m certainly gonna do it as long as I can,” McWhorter said.
In past years, vendors would have an additional opportunity to sell on the East block on Tuesdays. Now they more or less plug holes for the farmers’ market without taking up a whole park block. Lee-Hutson says the plan is to open the East block back up spring 2025 for Tuesday markets.
Eugene Saturday Market will reopen April 6 and run through Nov. 2. This year’s return should be exciting for community members from all backgrounds.
