Those Who Don't Know History

When the original Lane County Farmers Market started in 1915, the Pomona Grange founders had to fight off a company named Harbor-Sound Investment Company, who wanted to swoop in and establish one, charging farmers $10 a month, instead of the 25 cents a day the Grange was proposing. The grange representatives spoke to the Guard newspaper: "Our object is to bring together the consumer and producer for their mutual benefit. It is not to be a commercial project." They made it clear that this was to be a civic project owned by the community. Harbor-Sound faded away.

It was September, the height of the season, and tomatoes were one cent per pound, peaches ten cents per basket. The market caught on, thrived, and grew, on Park Street and all year round, too. More customers meant more producers, until in 1928 the 80 stalls were overcrowded by 90 to 115 producers. Still, anyone who was selling items they did not produce themselves, was ousted. In 1929 the public market became a pawn in a chess game as businessmen fought over where the center of town ought to be located. It was moving east, and businessmen with properties on Charnelton wanted it to move west. Groups of businessmen formed and schemed, and a new public market building was built at Charnelton and Broadway. It was glorious, but they had forgotten some of the essentials.

The producers revolted, and said they had not been consulted, resented being sold out, and would not move from the Park Blocks. The people who had built it up for the last 15 years felt that they owned it. After a bitter fight, the producers finally agreed to move to the building on Charnelton, where they rented space shared with a lunch counter, a grocery store which sold products not carried by the producers, and a commercial meat market. This was the summer of 1929.

When the 1929 crash resulted in the Depression, prices dropped but the public still came to buy what they could. A devastating blow occurred when the owner of the adjacent parking lot sold it to a gas station, eliminating customer parking. The market struggled through the 30's and the war years of the 40's, but declining numbers of small farms and the high costs of the building pinched. Producers were merely renters of stalls, and when the market decided to add more commercial enterprises to the site to pay expenses, rates were raised, and more farmers dropped away.Without the personal exchange from farmer to citizen, there was nothing to differentiate the market from a supermarket, and customers were drawn to the greater convenience and variety in the big stores. In 1955, what was once the Producers Public Market was sold to a Realty company from San Francisco, who resold it to a buyer from Portland. It closed in May of 1959.

In 1978, Lane County officials wondered if a producers' market might thrive in the vicinity of the decade-old Saturday Market. Our founder, Lotte Streisinger, had always held that fresh produce was an essential component of an open-air market. For the next ten years the adjacent Farmers market was managed as a wing of Saturday Market, and struggled and thrived according to where it was located. Next to each other, the two markets thrived.

One of the holders of this history is Shari Reyna, owner of the Fern's Edge Goat Dairy. She remembers the relationships built by trading lemonade for goat's milk, wool for clothing, and indeed, all of us who are longterm members of either market have interwoven our lives for decades. Shari managed the farmers for several years, as a volunteer. When the LCFM decided in 1988 to manage itself independent of Saturday Market, the two organizations still shared an office for many years, and shared expenses for permits, garbage disposal, and other services until recently.

Clearly, we are a community. We have a long history and have cooperated for 30 years and more, identifying ourselves as a unique, producer-to-customer market where you can meet the actual person who imagined, crafted, grew, or cooked up the purchase you just paid for. Your money keeps the producer alive and well and in return you get a lively, personal experience that tourists come from all over the world to experience.

History shows that restricting parking and adding large commercial businesses will kill the small producers and the unique, personal experience. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

You can read all about the early producers' market in the book Market Days, written by Stan Bettis and published by the Lane Pomona Grange Fraternal Society in 1969. For the history of the market we love now, you can look on wikipedia for some fairly accurate details, but mostly, you have to ask us, those of us who are there and have been there.

The founding mothers and fathers of our venerable, 41-year-old Saturday Market are still around. Lotte shops every week, and many of us continue to sell. Shari, Paul, Jan, Toby, Colleen and Dana, Ritta, Saman, Teresa, Gary, Gil, me, Beth, Kim, Vi, Ayala, Sue, Phil and Jan, and many others carry the history and know what our community needs and what works well. There are other farmers who have been working all this time as well. We are the community, we are the producers. Customers will tell you how long they have shopped at the markets, and everyone who does feels like part of a family, part of something extremely special.

The LCFM's appointed Community members and the developers who are trying to impose a vision on something that is already working need to not only consult us, but they need to listen to us. What they are trying to do, putting commercial booths out in the street and displacing traffic flow, parking and customer access, will not solve the problems of LCFM, will create huge problems, and is not what we, the community, want.