Sweet Home will hold its first downtown SALEbration from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 25 in two downtown parking lots on Long Street.
The event will include yard sale booths and other vendors who will sell arts and crafts, food, live music, sidewalk sales by participating merchants and wine tasting provided by two area wineries.
Two parking lots, behind the Rio Theater and between the library and City Hall, will hold 34 sales booths. Yellow balloons will mark participating businesses and other key locations for the event. Organizers have placed professionally made yellow signs and have run ads in several local newspapers and advertisers between Sweet Home and Albany to publicize the event.
Nancy Patton, chair of the Sweet Home Active Revitalization Effort (SHARE) Programming and Marketing Committee, which planned the event, said the purpose is to bring residents and visitors to the downtown area.
“I’ve heard people say we need things to bring the community together to have fun,” she said. “I love yard sales and I know most of the community really likes to do it.”
She said that organizers decided to have a centrally located event rather than send visitors around town with maps, which was an early idea.
“We invited the downtown merchants to participate,” she said. “It encourages us to get involved in the community in different events. It’s an opportunity for members of the community to come together to sell crafts and hold yard sales or be a musician to entertain us. It’s just a way to bring the community together to have fun.”
This event is only one the SHARE Planning and Marketing Committee has organized, including a business seminar earlier in the spring and the downtown cleanup before Frontier Sportsman’s Holiday. Patton said people who are eager to promote Sweet Home and make changes in the local economy are welcome to participate.
“If anybody wants to be on the committee, we’re looking for people,” she said.
Patton said the response to the SALEbration has been enthusiastic, once people got the word that it was happening.
“Since the deadline for signing up, I’ve gotten a bunch of calls,” she said. “We probably could easily have done 50 booths or even more.”