Engagement Committee Eyeing Farmers Market For Buzzards Bay
A farmers market/arts festival may be coming to Buzzards Bay next year.
Andy Driscoll, who runs the company Inebri-Art, went before the Bourne Community Engagement Committee on Wednesday, July 27, to pitch the idea for next season. Mr. Driscoll, a Plymouth resident, explained that his company largely focuses on promoting the arts through events usually hosted in partnership with bars, breweries, or restaurants. But lately, he said, that has been changing.
“One of our big events this past year has been Arts On The Green,” he said. “It’s an art fair every month that used to be going on in downtown Plymouth. We’ve been running a farmers market at Moonrise [Cinemas] in North Plymouth right on the Kingston line but it hasn’t been getting the kind of attendance that we were hoping for, so we’re trying to find it a new home.”
Inebri-Art is an eclectic company that produces a variety of podcasts and works with local businesses and creators to host events around Massachusetts. Earlier events include a Drink and Draw, where artists were invited to come to a bar, drink, socialize and get creative with whatever their medium of choice may be. Since the company’s inception in 2011, its scope has evolved and expanded to include comedy nights, marketplaces for local goods, art show pop-ups, and now, farmers markets.
“We started as arts and crafts,” Mr. Driscoll told the committee, “and pretty much everything we’ve done started by accident, and this is one of them. We had an artist reach out and wanted a space to sell stuff before Christmas. Then one Christmas became two, which became four times a year, and now we do it all over the place.”
Moonrise Cinemas outdoor theater is where the farmers market idea originated, and Inebri-Art has since leaned into the concept and is working to build a database of vendors that caters to farmers markets to supplement the various art-type vendors they already have.
“Our email list is about 700 strong and we have probably 300 [vendors] that we really work with regularly,” Mr. Driscoll said.
Regular vendors, he said, include The Fudge Lady from Uxbridge; a variety of soapmakers; artists of all mediums; a veteran-owned leather-goods maker; and Child’s Play Alpaca, a family-run farm from Carver that often brings its animals—alpacas, bunnies, donkeys, and ponies—along with it.
“Our rules are that it has to be locally sourced or locally made,” Mr. Driscoll said. “We just want to support local people who are making stuff locally and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a great experience for us because I’ve gotten to know [the people involved] and become friends and hang out outside of the markets. It just becomes like this big family.”
Should it be approved, the Bourne farmers market would occur on a weekly basis, with Buzzards Bay Park being the venue of choice. A bit of back-and-forth discussion between Mr. Driscoll and the board revealed that the most optimal day of the week for a farmers market in Bourne would likely be on Wednesdays. With the towns of Sandwich and Falmouth holding farmers markets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively, the committee thought that it would be good to have one in each community on different days during the week. Weekends were largely deemed unfavorable because of the implications bridge traffic could have on attendance and accessibility.
The committee was pleased with Mr. Driscoll’s pitch, with committee member and Select Board designee Judith M. Froman saying that they would like to “liven up Bourne” with just this kind of event.
“That routine type of thing,” she said, “people are looking for it.”
“We’d be excited to bring people to Bourne for good things,” said committee chairwoman Katharine Connor Jones.
All of these plans are still tentative, but Mr. Driscoll did confirm that he plans on filling out an application for the use of Buzzards Bay Park for the purpose of a farmers market/arts festival. Once the application is received, it will go to the select board for review.
“[Bourne] seems like it’s a really up and coming place,” Mr. Driscoll said. “I keep hearing more and more about it. A friend of mine moved down here and she said, ‘You need to be in Bourne.’”