Crystal Lewis holds a 250 million year old fossilized pinecone from Patagonia, Argentina at the Packwood Flea Market on Friday, Aug. 30, 2019.
Rustic items and tools for sale at the Packwood Flea Market on Friday, Aug. 30, 2019.
Labor Day weekend in Packwood can only mean one thing: Essentially any and every sort of merchandise will be available for purchase within the city limits of the little town that sits in the shadow of Mount Rainier.
The Packwood Flea Market, which runs every Friday through Monday encompassing Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, is suspected to be the largest flea market in the Northwest. That’s not a hard boast to believe as seemingly every bit of spare space just off U.S. Highway 12 in Packwood is occupied by vendors of various wares or converted into paid parking for the thousands of attendees.
Traffic on U.S. Highway 12 slows to a crawl as onlookers and shoppers — often touting a varied assortment of purchased items — quickly skirt across the roadway to still more rows and rows of tents on the other side. All the usual suspects of festival cuisine are set up in clumps in various areas.
“You know what I love most about Packwood? It’s family time. I love seeing the families,” said Crystal Lewis — whose first name is a perfect advertisement for the business she runs with her family selling rocks, precious stones and other geological anomalies.
They’ve been coming from Tacoma to set up shop at the flea market two times per year for the last 14 years or so. That’s a long enough span of time that they’ve seen certain repeat customers grow up right before their eyes. Lewis recounted a group of four girls that would come to their booth every year to crack open geodes — round rocks that, when opened, reveal colorful assortments of crystals inside.
“There were four girls, and they’ve been crackin’ since they were little kids, even before their teens, and we watched them grow up. And twice a year, every year, they’d come out and they’d crack the geodes,” said Lewis. Last September, the same group of girls stopped by their booth to say goodbye before they spread out across the United States for college.
When asked what the most unique item is in their inventory, Lewis’s husband, Rich, chimes in quickly: the pinecone — a 250 million year old fossilized pinecone from Patagonia, Argentina.
“You can see all the seeds inside from the seed pods,” Lewis said.
Elsewhere in the mix of tents and open tables filled with tools, clothes, handmade pieces of art is a tent where, on Friday, a couple of kids gathered around some TVs and played rounds of classic videogames.
The tent and its wares stood out a bit in the mix of antiques and more rustic items at nearby booths.
The booth’s owner, Jason — who preferred to just go with “Jason” for this story — said the items were a mixture of things that adults and kids could enjoy. There’re plenty of action figures, trading cards and other items for the kids and assortments of movies and videogames for adults to peruse.
In yet another booth, Justy Hedrick pointed out the dream catchers and children’s moccasins that are made primarily by her mother, Dee. She’s been doing it for about 35 years, and even made the display cases and tables that the items sit on. It’s a family run operation, said Hedrick, noting that she helps make the unique items as well, which are often made with natural items that could be plucked right from nature.
