Block party
Columbia Falls Farmers Market comes to life in a new location
Cool vocals of Stephen Jackman drift across the tree-canopied lawn.
Six-year-old boys line up for yet another free chair massage from Glen Holmes.
Old friends and new acquaintances chat over a Truby's pizza and Whistle Stop Caf dessert at the umbrella-shaded picnic tables.
Across the lawn, booths are laden with freshly picked Flathead cherries and hand-knotted rugs and home-canned hot-pepper jellies and goat cheese and eggs, while vendors around the corner do a little chair-dancing to the North Stage band, Spostah.
Welcome to the reborn Columbia Falls Farmers Market.
It's where everybody's got a smile and a friendly word for the next guy ambling across the lush grass from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Thursdays at Glacier Discovery Square in the rejuvenated uptown district.
An effort of the town's grass-roots First Best Place Task Force, the market started last summer and shifted into hyperphase this year.
"What's neat about it is not that we have a hub market and crowds of people turn out, it's the intimate atmosphere," task force Executive Director Barry Conger said.
"They get to see people they haven't connected with in a while. People like to be neighbors We didn't do anything special for the farmers market. It's the entity."
Entity or not, this year's numbers are nothing to sniff at.
Vendors quintupled from last year, with 70 or so showing up this past Thursday. Since a second music stage was added early in the season there's never been fewer than 50. Collectively, they tally better than $5,000 in sales each Thursday. It rises steadily each week despite weather.
A 6:30 p.m. head count routinely turns up 200 to 250 or more people wandering through the market. Children lose track of time in Laff-It-Up Inflatables' bouncy house.
"They tell me that our market is a fun place to be," market manager Cindy Shaw said. Shaw is a potter who sells her own artwork during the market, so she handles the logistics before and after but turns over on-the-ground market master duties to Linda Strause of the local Montana Coffee Traders.
Still, Shaw gets in on a lot of conversation.
"It's really nice, it's really great," they tell her. "Some of it is our new location with the shade - this year we have tons of shade and grass. We're very family friendly."
It's a marked improvement over the location of last year's start-up. Truby's owner Kristin Voisin had made the market possible by donating use of her newly purchased lot a block to the south. It was at a popular crossroads, but for the most part treeless and dusty underfoot. It provided an invaluable beginning, but loyal market-goers are reveling this year in the grassy lawn and mature shade trees that make it feel like their hometown neighborhood.
That sense of neighborhood stretches a good distance beyond city limits.
"We have a really nice mix," Shaw said. "It's predominantly Columbia Falls people, maybe half and half. But then we have tourists and a few from Whitefish and a few Kalispell people. A lot of those Kalispell people are those who work here and then stay (for the market)."
Although the Columbia Falls organizers diligently checked with neighboring cities and chose Thursday nights to avoid conflicts with other markets and festivals, downtown Kalispell's Thursday!Fest kicked into gear mid-summer on the same night.
"In the first Thursday!Fest we lost 12 vendors," Shaw said. "All but two came back. And one of those apologized, but said he had to 'stay in Kalispell) because he sold more
"(Others' tell me, 'Whether we sell as much we're coming anyway, because we have a good time.'"
Shaw said other market organizers in the Flathead have been generous with their help.
"The Whitefish people have been very supportive of us," she said. "They told us what pitfalls to avoid they encouraged us."
Columbia Falls follows the Whitefish market model, limiting vendors to those selling handmade, homegrown or embellished goods, with a mix of about two-thirds artisans and one-third edibles. And they follow Whitefish on the mid-September ending date. They could bring in more produce by continuing the season a few weeks longer, Shaw acknowledged, but the timing is a balance that seems to work.
Now, in the height of the season, it's working amazingly well.
After all, it's a fun thing to do, Shaw said. It's relaxing. And it adds a new outlet for what's bubbling to the surface all over Columbia Falls.
"It adds a sense of community gathering place," she said. "I think we really are developing more of a sense of community. We are not a bedroom community to Kalispell. It's a place where people come together.
"I've seen people walk by a picnic table, maybe they know each other from work but don't know each other all that well. Hands are being shaken all around. And they stay and sit to the end."
Don't miss it: Columbia Falls Farmers Market, 5 to 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Sept. 17 at Glacier Discovery Square, 540 Nucleus Ave. From U.S. 2 in Columbia Falls, turn north on Nucleus, go four blocks to the top of the hill.