North Carolina Cooperative extension and city’s new Pilgrim’s Sanford Agricultural Marketplace will better connect local farmers with sanford’s growing community
By Gordon Anderson gordon@rantnc.com | Photos by Ben Brown
In 2019, The Rant Monthly published a photo essay about the Sanford Farmers Market. Back then, the market was open on Saturdays for much of the year in the parking lot of the McSwain Extension Center on Tramway Road, and featured just a handful of vendors. Although there weren’t many of them, their offerings were consistently great — stuff of a quality you just don’t find at most supermarkets, stuff you’d brag to your friends about.
But the market back then was tucked away outside a government building that didn’t get much traffic from anyone who wasn’t already going there, even during the week. On weekends it was even quieter.
There just wasn’t a whole lot of buzz about the Sanford Farmers Market. But a lot has changed since then.
On April 4, the market enters a new phase as it’ll open to the public for the first time in its permanent location at 157 Charlotte Avenue — dubbed the Pilgrim’s Sanford Agricultural Marketplace in honor of one of the project’s first corporate donors (more on that in a bit). Every Saturday through late November, the building — filled with vendors offering all kinds of locally grown produce and other food — will welcome visitors and shoppers from 8:30 a.m. to noon.
The more than 12,000-square-foot facility marks a whole lot more than just a new phase for the market, though. It represents not just a lot of work by a lot of partners — the city of Sanford and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension at the helm — but also a shared vision that continues the city’s gradual but steady transition from a rural environment to a more urban one than it’s been in the past, while celebrating the agricultural history (and present) of many of Lee County’s more rural areas.
“A major goal for the city council has been to figure out spaces that will allow us to preserve our character and heritage while being innovative and really activating the spaces we have,” said Sanford Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon. “Putting agriculture in the heart of downtown really underscores that connection and says we support our local farmers being able to maintain that space so people understand how important they are to our community.”
The market first moved downtown from the extension in 2020, and has been held each Saturday during the season in a city owned parking lot bounded by Chatham Street, Charlotte Avenue and McIver Street.
In that time, it has drawn thousands upon thousands of folks downtown — by 2022 about 700 people were visiting the market each week, a number that only continued to grow through last summer. Sanford Tourism Development Authority Wendy Bryan says it has become the county’s “number one entry point for visiting downtown” and that the organization expects as many as 68,000 visitors to the market in 2026. She added that as many as 40 percent of the market’s visitors come from outside Lee County.
“We think the impact of this market will be even greater than what we hope and anticipate,” she said.
The market hadn’t been downtown for very long at all when the ball really got moving on making the Charlotte Avenue location — which until that point was home to vacant building which had once housed a roofing company — the market’s permanent location. Project partners first made loose plans known that October, and in March of 2021 the city announced a $505,000 grant from poultry producer Pilgrim’s that kicked things into the next gear. There were bumps along the way — the King Roofing building was initially expected to be repurposed as the market’s home, a plan that the aging structure ultimately couldn’t accommodate — but the market continued to thrive in its temporary location across the street while community decision makers hammered out details.
Other funding sources came into play along the way — they included $1 million from the Ruby and Ernest McSwain Worthy Lands Trust, $900,000 from the Rural Transformation Grant Fund, more than $600,000 from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund, and $50,000 from the Lee County Farm Bureau.
The public got its first look at the facility on March 25, at a ribbon cutting attended by several hundred people that included elected leaders, city and county staff, business partners and more.
“We just have a huge opportunity here to showcase what we have in Sanford as far as our farms,” Kelli Laudate, executive director of Downtown Sanford Inc. told The Rant. “It’s huge, it’s the backbone of who we are and who we’ve been forever. It just shows that when you dream big and work as a team, you can absolutely create all this things in your community for everyone to enjoy.”
The market won’t just be a nice addition to downtown Sanford — it’ll also be unique in the region. Meredith Favre and Bill Stone, through their work with Lee County’s North Carolina Cooperative Extension office, have been two of the people closest to the project’s progress in recent years. Their enthusiasm for the space was palpable during a walk through prior to completion in early March.
“There’s nothing like this in the region,” said Stone, the Extension director in Lee County. “We talk about the folks from Sanford and Lee County coming out, but once we get the word out, we think this will be a real destination.”
Favre is the extension’s local foods coordinator, a position the county created in 2022 to help guide the market’s progress into its new home along. She coordinates the market’s vendors each week and plans education programming in conjunction with the market — functions that will all be under the same roof beginning this year.
Programming previously made use of the extension’s space on Tramway Road or other facilities as necessary.
“This permanent, dedicated space really allows us to think about how we can expand because it’s not a space that is being used as parking on other days of the week,” she said.
Those opportunities for expansion will be many, and staff are already looking at the possibility of having the market open on days other than Saturday. The market’s open air pavilion is made up of 8,300 square feet for vendors and other attractions like weekly live music, while another 4,000-plus will include office space (of which the extension will make use), meeting space, a classroom kitchen that can be used to offer community cooking classes and more, and even a commercial kitchen.
“The shared use commercial kitchen meets all the guidelines for commercial food production and it’ll be available for rental by anyone who needs it,” she said. “And really, as soon as the word got out about this kitchen, we started getting calls. We’ve had a lot of people over the years saying things like ‘I want to make and market this product, but it’ll cost me $20,000 or $30,000 to upgrade my kitchen, and that’s not feasible.’ This gives the community a space people can use for that kind of thing, and in that way can kind of act as an incubator kitchen.”
The marketplace will open for the 2026 season with 40 vendors — up from the 28 to 30 it featured weekly in 2025 — and the potential to hold up to 52. Those vendors, mainly from Lee, Chatham, Moore, Wake, and Harnett, will offer goods mostly produced within a 100 mile radius of downtown Sanford, although visitors can also expect vendors from as far away as the coast offering things like fresh seafood.
Favre said the market’s presence won’t just be a plus for curious shoppers looking for a weekend outing or to get ingredients for dinner. It’s also aimed at addressing food insecurity in the area.
“Downtown is a bit of a food desert and near some low income areas,” she said. “We wanted this to be in a place people could walk to and we want to have programs that can help people with food insecurity. SNAP vouchers will be eligible for use, and we’ve submitted an application for WIC as well.”
The Rant Monthly published a cover story in 2025 about the increasing loss of farmland in Lee County. Nearly everyone interviewed for this story said the marketplace is part of an effort that re-centers agriculture — even if it can’t address the loss of farm land head-on — and the work of the farming community as integral to how things fit together locally. In fact, Stone said the close collaboration between Sanford city government and the cooperative extension is somewhat rare, just by virtue of the fact that cities and cooperative extension operations usually have different goals and priorities. That’s not the case in Sanford.
“You don’t typically see as much cooperation between a city and the extension like this,” he said.
That spirit of collaboration is something Salmon reiterated as well, and said is exemplified in Sanford and Lee County.
“One of the things that’s truly remarkable about this project is it inspired so many organizations and groups to want to be a part of something so transformational,” she said. “It’s not just a city project, it’s so much bigger. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a project that had so many partners coming together around a common vision.”
The market itself is also part of something bigger — something that’s not quite visible yet, but in motion all the same. The city’s plan is that it will be an anchor for the eventual “Sanford Central Green,” an ambitious, large scale project that will eventually connect that part of downtown to the reconfigured City Hall which sits just a couple miles north of the marketplace on Weatherspoon Street. It’s likely to be several years before that project, which envisions greenway trails, retail space and more, is fully realized. But the marketplace makes several, large steps toward that goal.
“It’s something that sets us apart,” Salmon said. “There’s a strategic effort to have it be central to what’s going to be the Sanford Central Green, and this just hits so many of our larger community goals in making sure we’re meeting this moment as our community continues to grow. Everyone is being so intentional in how we move forward, and we want to keep that sense of place that will help Sanford continue to be Sanford for years to come. We’re really seeking to be our best selves.”
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Learn More
For more information about the Sanford Farmers Market and the Pilgrim’s Sanford Agricultural Marketplace, including a full event calendar, visit sanfordfarmersmarketnc.com.