Look up Manakin Market online and the first thing you'll find is its own obituary. The listing on Marketspread, the platform the market used to post its weekly vendor lineups, still carries the notice: fourteen seasons, ended by construction, closed for good at the end of 2024. If you moved to Manakin-Sabot in the last year and heard the market was gone, that page is probably where the story stopped for you.
Drive out Broad Street Road on a Saturday morning this September and the story keeps going. There is a farmers market running on that same stretch of road right now, in the same May-through-October window the old one kept, just smaller and under different management. The market people think died in 2024 didn't disappear. It shrank, changed operators, and is currently squeezed into a construction footprint while a mixed-use development called Manakin Towne gets built around it. That's a meaningfully different story than "the market closed," and it's the one that actually explains what you'll find if you go looking for tomatoes this weekend.
What Actually Ended in 2024
The market that closed was My Manakin Market, run for fourteen years by a company called ChiknEGG Productions at 68 Broad Street Road, under a grove of shade trees that regulars talk about as much as the produce. At its peak it was one of the larger markets in the region by vendor count, with local write-ups describing more than 50 stalls covering pastured meat, cheese, cut flowers, wine, and handmade crafts alongside the produce stands.
That version of the market started running into trouble in 2023, when construction for Manakin Towne pushed vendors out of the tree grove and into an open field closer to the road. The market's own event pages from that season describe the move as temporary, tied directly to the Manakin Towne buildout. By the close of the 2024 season, the operator called it: the market was done in that form, a casualty of the same construction that had already displaced it once.
The Project Behind the Disruption
Manakin Towne is the mixed-use development responsible for both the 2023 relocation and the 2024 shutdown notice. The project's own site describes it in the kind of language you'd expect from a developer marketing a new neighborhood: townhomes and commercial space overlooking Sycamore Creek Golf Course, positioned as
"one of the most anticipated developments in the Richmond area."
What's more useful for a current resident than the marketing copy is the detail buried in the market's own 2024 event listings: the plan calls for the finished development to eventually bring the market back to its original spot under the trees. In other words, the empty lot isn't a permanent loss of green space, it's a construction phase with an end point built into the plan. Whether that timeline holds is the kind of thing worth watching if you live close enough to notice the equipment on Broad Street Road, but the intent on record is restoration, not replacement.
What's Actually Running on Broad Street Now
While Manakin Towne gets built, a market is still operating on the corridor, now under RVAg, a nonprofit that runs several farmers markets across the Richmond area. It keeps the same basic shape as before: Saturdays, roughly 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., May through October, on Broad Street Road.
What it doesn't have yet is the scale of the old market. A recent visitor account describes it as small but mighty: a produce stand or two, a couple of bakeries, a coffee vendor, a soap maker, a rotating food truck, and a small play area for kids, with a stage that sometimes has a bluegrass band and sometimes sits empty. That's a real step down from the 50-plus vendor market of a few years ago, and it's worth setting that expectation before you drive out expecting the old version. What you'll find instead is a market still rebuilding its footprint in the middle of an active construction zone, which tracks with a project that hasn't finished the phase that's supposed to give it a permanent home again.
The Rest of the Corridor Never Waited on the Market to Sort Itself Out
The market's ups and downs matter less to daily life here than you might expect, because Broad Street Road was never a one-stop strip. The businesses that actually anchor a Manakin-Sabot Saturday kept running the whole time:
- Satterwhite's, at 116 Broad Street Rd, for breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Saturday, closed Mondays, the kind of counter where regulars know the waitresses by name
- Lola's Farmhouse Bistro, set in an 1865 farmhouse on Manakin Road, known for Sunday brunch on the porch
- Sunset Grill, for a Pittsburgh-style steak or a Cuban sandwich built on slow-roasted pork and Virginia ham
- The Broadview Shopping Center, anchored by Food Lion and Enzo's, with the Virginia ABC store sitting right between them if your Saturday errand list ends with a bottle instead of a basket
None of that changed while the market moved fields, changed operators, and shrank. If your weekend routine already runs through Satterwhite's for breakfast or Lola's for brunch, the market's construction-era transition has been mostly background noise. If the market itself was the destination, this is the year to recalibrate expectations rather than assume it's simply gone.
What This Means If You Live Here
The market's last two years are a decent preview of what a construction cycle looks like on a road you use every week. Something gets displaced, a smaller version fills the gap, and the parts of daily life that don't depend on the construction site keep running the way they always have. That's a different experience than a closure, even when the announcement uses the word "permanently."
If you're planning your Saturday around the market, go in expecting the compact version currently running on Broad Street Road, not the fourteen-season market you might remember or have heard about secondhand. And if you're the kind of resident who tracks what a project like Manakin Towne eventually delivers, and how developments like it tend to shape property values along a corridor over several years, that's exactly the kind of question Search RVA Homes tracks for Manakin-Sabot and the rest of the Richmond area. If you're ever curious what a changing corridor like this one means for your own home's value, our instant home valuation tool is a quick way to get a current number without guessing.
