This summer villagers Amanda and Brad Swanton-Young started a new artisan market at the Union School House. Vendors, who include local artists and crafts people, set up stands in front of the building’s front lawn. Shown in the photo is Amanda Swanton-Young. (photo by Lauren Heaton)
New Saturday market opens
- Published: July 14, 2011
Yellow Springs may not welcome residential sprawl, but outdoor market sprawl of the kind two Union School House tenants started this summer may be a welcome addition to the Saturday shopping shuffle in the village. Judging by the artisan booths that lined the Union School House yard on Dayton Street on a recent Saturday with vendors selling everything from fine art to art made from recycled products, Yellow Springs’s new Artisan Market is providing a needed place of exchange.
The idea for a new outdoor market germinated over the winter as villagers Amanda and Brad Swanton-Young were thinking of ways to gain exposure for their consignment and recycled product business, Another Man’s Treasure, located at the Union School House. The lawn in front of their building, which also has restrooms, a large parking lot in the back and parking along the north side of Dayton Street, seemed like a perfect location, Amanda Swanton-Young said in an interview last week.
The market scored a temperate and sunny day for its first Saturday and attracted small but steady foot traffic throughout the day. Shoppers benefited too, taking advantage of free 15-minute shiatsu massages by Julie Moore of It’s Moore Than Massage, It’s Shiatsu. Nine stands set up to sell handmade goods such as oil finger-painted tiles and canvases, Ohio t-shirts with handmade pockets, hand-spun alpaca and alpaca scarves and ornaments, fine jewelry, metal art, stoneware, and art made from recycled products by Yellow Springs resident Leslie Lippert.
The Artisan Market takes advantage of the traffic that the village’s two farmers markets bring on Saturday mornings, and it provides a venue for trading crafts and used items, which tends to be limited to the village’s biannual Street Fairs, Swanton-Young said. It will continue throughout the summer as a market and “swap meet” where used items can be sold and traded in order to promote the reduce, reuse, recycle theme that Swanton-Young embraces.
While the couple has lived in the village for a year and found Mills Lawn School to be “the best elementary school my children have ever been to,” Swanton-Young said, the family will soon relocate to northern Kentucky, where they are building a straw bale house on a small farm. They plan to continue operating that market and sharing their Union School House office with Amanda’s father, Robert Swanton, who lives in the Dayton area and owns a jewelry sales and repair business.
The market operates Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through October. The space can accommodate between 20 and 30 vendors, each of whom get a 10×10-foot spot for $28 one-time or $24 a week for continual reservation. Vendors can claim a space on Saturday or reserve one ahead of time by calling Swanton-Young at 937-206-0034 or stopping by her office in room 210 at the school house on Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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