New Clinton Farmers Market brings flavor, craft and community to fairgrounds
Some of the vendors on hand for the first Clinton Farmers Market for 2025 are set up at the Anderson County Fairgrounds on Saturday (May 24). At left are the new market’s organizers, Clinton sheep farmers Matthew Garafolo and Maggie Hanson, who produce Katahdin sheep, and sell lamb meat at the market. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
There were artisan goods, baked goods, eggs, beef, lamb, crafts, and some limited produce available, as well as some food trucks on hand for the event, which took place under partly sunny skies with cool breezes.
Garafolo said the next market session had not been determined yet, but that he planned to return to the fairgrounds location sometime in June. For now, the group is looking at monthly markets rather than the weekly ones the previous market had.
With its organizers, new location and new day and time, the new Clinton Farmers Market aims to succeed where the previous version failed, Garafolo said.
The East Tennessee FARM group had sponsored the Clinton Farmers Market the previous three years – the first year in the city parking lot on Commerce Street and the past two years in Clinton’s Lakefront Park.
But the group announced in March that it did not intend to operate the market this year, citing a lack of vendor interest.
Garafalo, a Clinton sheep farmer, and his partner, Maggie Hanson, operated their Clinch River Katahdins booth at Saturday’s market, selling fresh Katahdin lamb.
Katahdin, the breed of sheep Garafolo produces on his farm, “work very well in a variety of production situations as a low-maintenance, easy care sheep,” according to the website katahdins.org.
These Katahdin hair sheep “provide a practical option to producers who are primarily interested in raising a meat animal, with great lamb vigor [and] mothering ability, and do not want to shear or are no longer able to find shearers,” the website notes.
Garafolo said he and Hanson decided to revive the Clinton market in part as a way to help market their own lamb products.
They decided to hold it on Saturdays instead of on Thursday mornings, as the FARM group had.
“We hope to have our market once or twice a month, and the city would like for us to have it closer to downtown,” Garafalo said earlier. “We’re looking at maybe using the city parking lot behind the Daugherty Lofts, or the new city lot along [Main Street].”
