Wild Times at the Farmers Market
Here is a fun article posted today about Detroit's Farmers Markets
Wild Times at the Farmers Market
http://detnews.com/article/20110731/...OzGkw.facebook
Since 1803, Detroit's markets have been a hub of commerce, a meeting place for colorful characters, a site of food fights and a fond tradition
Bill Loomis/ Special to The Detroit News
Summer Saturdays in Detroit means it's time to shop at the venerable and still popular Eastern Market, a destination drawing untold thousands of bargain hunters for more than 125 years.
Yet perhaps few shoppers today know that the market, bracketed by Gratiot Avenue, the I-75 service drive, Mack Avenue and St. Aubin, is the descendant of a rich cornucopia of Detroit farmers markets that blossomed in the 1800s, not only providing innovative technologies but also producing sometimes hilarious, occasionally notorious episodes.
Over the years, the markets were peopled by French gardeners, Canadians, Ojibwas and Wyandots, fur traders, trappers, wild game hunters, fishermen and later rebellious and politically powerful butchers, rowdy drovers and farmers derided in the city press of the day for "unkempt heads and beards that grow out of peculiar patterns and fashions."
Then, of course, there were armies of marauding rats, pickpockets and thieves so brazen they were seen carrying away wheels of cheese and even whole hog carcasses.
In one of the very earliest markets, near Jefferson Avenue, the sheriff erected a whipping post to help keep order. Police and inspectors patrolled later markets.
Central Market, built beginning in 1875 in Cadillac Square in the heart of downtown Detroit, was the stomping grounds of the notorious Francis Benson, a vendor arrested 26 times in 20 years on various charges, including indecent exposure, shooting into a crowd, cheating, drunkenness and "acting insane." He did beat the rap on the death of his wife, though, when it turned out that she died not from his vicious beatings but from alcohol poisoning.........
