The 2025 Shopping by Lantern Light, Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving, drew what appeared to be the largest crowd yet for the annual event, at least since it moved three years ago to the Farmers Market location behind the Visit Statesboro! center on South Main Street.

Shoppers parked across the street at the Queensborough Bank and up the block at First United Methodist Church. Georgia Southern University buses ferried shoppers from First Baptist to Queensborough. As the parking lot at the Statesboro-Bulloch County Library filled to near capacity, shoppers on foot teemed down the Willie McTell Trail and strolled as a crowd across the double footbridge to the market area.

Interviewed about one hour into the three-hour, 5:30-8:30 p.m. event, Kelsie Cobb, market manager for Statesboro Main Street Farmers Market, of course did not have an attendance count or dollar tally for Lantern Light yet. But she observed that it appeared to build on the success of the Saturday morning markets, held for about 34 weeks from the first Saturday in April until Nov.  22.

“I would just really love to say that this would not be possible without the Farmers Market team, Visit Statesboro and all of our vendors,” Cobb said. “So I’m so incredibly grateful for this turnout. I’m so glad that the community showed up for small businesses, and I’m just incredibly grateful for this event.”

At the end of each market day or evening, she seeks a sales estimate from each vendor.

“For the season we are at about $700,000 stimulated back into small businesses and the local economy, an average of about $22,000 a week,” Cobb said.

That was the rough average they had calculated for all of this year’s Saturday markets, which had  an average of 47 vendors participating each week. Cobb said they should have a total next week for Lantern Light.

Over 100 vendors

But the Tuesday, Nov. 25 lantern-lighted festival, intended to launch  the holiday shopping season, was much larger than a typical Saturday morning market in terms of the number of vendors onsite and the vehicular and foot traffic along the South Main Street corridor.

Lantern Light may have ended up with nearly 110 vendors, Cobb said. The colorful event map available at the information booth area in the north end of the market building showed the locations of 105. These included 14 tables in the interior middle rows of the market  building, occupied by business  as varied as Mack’s Mussels, Potted Toad Studios, Kildare Station, Bake My Day Bakery and Crafts by Sue, and the 21 tables along interior walls held by Jacobs Produce, Isreally Humus, Humble Bumble Honey, Adams Family Popcorn, Lakeshore Pottery, Mama E’s Cheese Straws and Rooted Society among others, to those 19 more vendors just beyond the exterior walls but still under the  patio awnings such as Sweet Bee Jewelry, Magpie Candle Company, Whiskey Grail, Ma’s Country Pantry and My Stitch Doctor.

Murphy McRae, the Visitor Center manager who also serves on the management team for the farmer’s market, designed what Cobb called the “incredible map” with its cutaway, side-angle view of the market building, and venue expanded to encompass the total Visit Statesboro site, including icons designating the Visitor Center building as the home for photos with Santa.

As the map and its numbered and color-coded legends showed, there were also 42 outside vendor tents, not merely in the usual spaces, behind and to the south end of the market building, but extending toward the street to occupy most of the Visitors Center parking. There were also nine vendor trucks, at least eight of them designated for food, beverage or dessert items.

“So we definitely expanded this year into the parking lot,” Cobb said, looking out on the crowd. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many people in this building. This is incredible. I definitely think it’s larger than last year.”

Cobb started working for the market about two weeks before last year’s Lantern Light event, then took over from the previous Main Street Farmers Market manager, her friend Willow Farmer, for this year’s market season.

In some past seasons the Lantern Light market drew mostly a different group of vendors than the Saturday markets, with the Thanksgiving-week event offering mostly gift items and holiday sweets, baked goods and jellies, and attended by only two or three produce vendors, but that  was not the case in 2025.

Good weather helped

Weather appeared to have cooperated, not only with a warm, dry Tuesday market night, but with fresh vegetables such as cabbages, radishes, peppers, collards, kale and arugula still available, as well as seasonably durable sweet potatoes and squashes.

“Almost all of our produce vendors are here, actually,” Cobb said. “We had one vendor last year who didn’t do it but decided to do it this year. We have five main produce vendors who are pretty much there throughout the entire season, and all five of them are here tonight.”

Those seasonal. regulars were Jacobs Produce, Hazelnut Pastures, Mack Family Farm, Franklin Citrus Farm and Poor Robin Gardens. But other vendors also brought produce to Lantern Light, and Cobb noted that Hunter Cattle Company, a Bulloch County family farming operation whose main “produce” is meat, was represented at Lantern Light, as throughout the season.

“There’s produce, there’s artisans -- and as far as artisans go there’s crochet, there’s ceramics, there’s woodcraft, there’s fabric arts – there’s prepared food, so there’s pies and breads and empanadas and truly like, everything,” Cobb said.

Striking olive oil

Interesting stories can always be found among the vendors, and Shopping by Lantern Light offered an opportunity to meet a pioneer of Georgia’s still modest but determined olive oil industry.

Tommie Williams, his wife Stephanie, and other members of the family that owns Terra Dolce Farms near Lyons were there selling their Terra Dolce extra virgin olive oil and some flavored varieties of the oil. This is the same Tommie Williams who served 16 years in the Georgia Senate, including about four years each as its Republican majority leader and president pro tem. He retired from the Legislature by not seeking re-election in 2016.

Having already planted some olive trees by then, he said he prayed that if God wanted him to do anything after that other than grow olives, to let him know. After a few weeks he got a call from former Gov. Sonny Perdue, then U.S. secretary of agriculture by appointment from President Donald Trump in his first term. Perdue asked him to serve as an agricultural liaison to Italy.

“So, me and my family we went to Rome, Italy for three years and we worked on agricultural policy, and I was able to learn a lot about how to grow olive trees from the Italians, since they’ve been doing it for a few thousand years,” Williams said.

But he acknowledges that Georgia’s climate presents special challenges for growing olives.

“Well,  it’s better in a Mediterranean climate, where during the summer it doesn’t  rain and you can irrigate what you need, but  it produces more oil content in the olive for the mill,” Williams said. “So, we’re trying some  new varieties. Every year I’ve planted another variety or two.”

Williams started planting olive trees 15 years ago, and Terra Dolce, which has its own mill and bottling operation, has been producing some oil for 12 years now. He now tends about 15,000 olive trees of six different varieties, mostly Spanish varieties, but is trying some from the south of France for cold-hardiness.

The 2024 season was a tough one for Lyons-area olives, as for much of Georgia’s agriculture.

“We had a hurricane, we had a hail storm during the blooming season, we had five 10-inch rains in the last year, which that right there is enough to wipe anything out, and then we had a snow storm,” he said.

2025’s weather has been better, but then Williams developed lymphoma this summer and has gone through cancer treatments.

“It’s been a tough year for us. But we’re still at it; we’re going to get through it,” he said.

Terra Dolce was offering sample tastes of olive oil on cubes of bread and appeared to be doing steady sales during Lantern Light, as did many of the other vendors.

Now, Statesboro’s in-person, public Farmers Market takes a break until the season starts again in April. But its online ordering option, Statesboro Market2Go, operates year-round. For more information, visit statesboromarket2go.locallygrown.net