Like their great-great-grandparents did 83 years ago, Eli, Katie, Erinn, and Madison Ball, package up purchases, smile and share stories with customers at the Henderson County Curb Market. For 67 years, their grandma, Nancy Ball, has sold flowers and crafts at the market, and she’s still there most weeks three times a week. Nancy Ball’s grandmother and grandfather, Nancy Ann and B.S. Justice, were vendors at the market when it first opened, under a few umbrellas on Main Street, in 1924.

The Curb Market is not spectacular, but it is special. A simple, low, long, brick building on Church Street in downtown Hendersonville, North Carolina, it houses about ninety vendors over the course of the year. What’s special about it is that everything sold there, year-round, is hand-made or homegrown by the vendors. There are more than fifty kinds of jams, jellies, relishes, chow-chows, butters and sauces; jewelry, bonnets and aprons, dried flowers, gourmet cupcakes, hooked rugs, sculptures made from hornet’s nests, pottery, apple cider, and seasonal fruits and vegetables of all kinds. There are even wild foods distinct to our mountains; this spring saw both ramps and poke sallet (a traditional asparagus-like shoot) for sale. And that’s just the beginning of the market’s offerings.

The market is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 9am-2pm, so being there is not a full-time endeavor. These are small, home-based operations: for many vendors, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are spent growing, harvesting and making the items sold on market days. The same person sitting at a market table with a head of lettuce likely picked it the night before and packed it that morning.
But on market days, “It’s like your home. It’s like your family,” says Nancy Ball. For five generations at her family’s stall, flowers from the same piece of land in Henderson County have been carried downtown and sold to the public at the Curb Market. The amazing thing is that this is not at all unusual. Several of the vendors are sitting in the same chairs where their great-grandma once sat. Vendors sit together in the same building week after week, year after year, and become like kin. A five-member board of vendors makes decisions, and while not everyone is always pleased, the group maintains its unity.

The Curb Market began during Western North Carolina’s early heyday as a health and leisure destination. During the 1920’s, just like today, people with the means to travel came from all over the South to beat the summer heat and enjoy the mountains. Many visitors stayed in boarding houses, and farmers would travel from house to house selling their wares to these seasonal residents.

At the time, farmers got smart and realized everybody could save time, rest horse-hooves and give customers more choice by bringing the shoppers to the farmers instead of the other way around. So, the farmers gathered and formed a market. Nancy Ball says that the product lines haven’t changed much, except that now there are more crafts and less meat for sale. Meat was an early mainstay, but became scarce when processing and handling regulations made it hard to bring product to local markets.

While other tourist-heavy destinations are happy to sell t-shirts, shot glasses and other straight-from-the-box “I’ve been there” memorabilia, the Curb Market never has. Long-time vendor and board member Ralph King says nobody has wanted to, and it’s that uniqueness and the all-local approach that keep customers coming back.

Peter Marks is the local food and farm coordinator for Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP). ASAP’s Local Food Guide is available at area retailers and online at www.appalachiangrown.org.

Back to New Life Journal..