Most Saturday mornings this summer, Sandusky Street between William and Winter has been closed to cars from 9 a.m. to noon. Tables sit in the traffic lanes instead of crowding the sidewalks. Shoppers walk down the middle of a street that normally carries cars past the Hamburger Inn and Clō Wine Gallery & Lounge. It is a small change to how downtown Delaware spends three hours a week, and it is easy to treat it as just that: a market that got a little more room.
But the calendar this fall does something the market's new layout does not on its own. On September 19, the same Saturday morning the farmers market sets up as usual, the Delaware County Fair opens for its eight-day run a short drive north on Pennsylvania Avenue. Two of downtown's most reliable weekly and annual events land on the same morning, in different parts of the city, with different traffic patterns, on a date the market's own schedule does not exclude. If you plan your Saturday around the market's usual rhythm, this is the one to build a little slack into.
What Actually Changed on Sandusky Street
For 2026, Main Street Delaware moved its farmers market off the sidewalks and into the road. Sandusky Street closes from William Street to Winter Street during market hours, a shift the organization coordinated directly with the City of Delaware and the Delaware Police Department. Mayor Carolyn Kay Riggle called it a layout built around safety and accessibility, and Main Street Delaware's own announcement frames it as a response to a market that has grown enough to need the extra width.
The season runs every Saturday from May 23 through October 31, skipping only July 4 and October 10. That means the market keeps its normal footprint straight through the busiest stretch of the fall calendar, including the Saturday the fair opens.
Downtown businesses have built their own morning around the closure. The Delaware Gazette's coverage points to Hamburger Inn and Clō Wine Gallery & Lounge for breakfast and patio seating, The Greater Gouda for samples straight off the grill, and a run of coffee stops in Fresh Start Café & Bakery, Coffeeology, Choffey's Coffee & Confections and Ciao Café. Columbus Running Company hosts a group run before the market opens, which means the closed street is doing double duty as a course before it becomes a row of vendor tents.
Why September 19 Is Worth Circling Twice
The market's schedule is fixed months in advance. The fair's dates move with the calendar year to year, tied to when the Little Brown Jug falls on the third Thursday after Labor Day. In 2026, Labor Day lands on September 7, which puts the Jug on September 24 and pushes the fair's opening Saturday to September 19, the same day the market is already running downtown.
That means two separate crowds converge on the same morning in two separate places. Downtown, the market closure holds Sandusky Street through noon. A short drive away, the Delaware County Fairgrounds at 236 Pennsylvania Avenue opens its gates for day one of an eight-day run. Neither event moves for the other. If your Saturday plan includes both a market coffee run and an early trip to the fairgrounds, you are working around two different footprints of downtown traffic in the same window, not one.
The Week That Follows Doesn't Slow Down
The lead-up to fair week actually starts six days earlier. The All Horse Parade steps off at 3 p.m. on Sunday, September 13, from the Fairgrounds' main gate onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a three-mile route with more than 140 units of horses, mules, donkeys and bands. It is one of the largest non-motorized parades east of the Mississippi, and it is always the Sunday before the fair opens.
From there, the week runs on its own internal schedule:
- September 13: All Horse Parade, 3 p.m., three-mile route from the Fairgrounds
- September 16 through 24: live racing at the Fairgrounds, with the five-day Grand Circuit meet running September 20 through 24
- September 19 through 26: the Delaware County Fair, eight days of fair events at the Fairgrounds
- September 23: the Jugette, the filly counterpart race
- September 24: the 81st running of the Little Brown Jug, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The Jug itself is the county's biggest single day. It has drawn crowds estimated around 50,000 in past years, according to Touring Ohio's account of the race's history, which also traces the event back to 1937, when the Delaware County Agricultural Society voted to move the fair from Powell to its current grounds on the city's northern edge. Jug Day carries its own admission structure too. General admission on Jug Day runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., after which regular fair pricing takes over. Seniors 55 and older get in free on Senior Day, and military and veterans with ID get free admission on Military Day. Parking at the Fairgrounds runs $5 per vehicle on Thursday, the one day of the week the fair charges for it.
Fair Week Ends, First Fridays Don't
Once the fair packs up on September 26, downtown's monthly rhythm picks back up without much of a pause. Main Street Delaware's First Friday series continues into October with a night themed "Stop, Drop, and Dance," built around Fire Prevention Week and Hispanic Heritage Month. City of Delaware Fire Department trucks and rescue vehicles park downtown alongside fire prevention activities and live music, a smaller-scale echo of the same block-party energy the market and the fair bring earlier in the season.
The farmers market keeps going too, straight through October 31, meaning the same closed stretch of Sandusky Street that hosts fair-week shoppers in September is still running six weeks later, past the point most people have stopped thinking about the fair at all.
What This Means for Your Saturdays
Parking downtown works the same way it has for a couple of years now, which helps on a fall weekend with this much happening at once. Free two-hour on-street parking runs Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Paid zones, including the four municipal lots, run $1 an hour on weekdays through 5 p.m., managed through the city's ParkMobile system. Weekends are free across the board, and the municipal lot on Spring Street carries no time limit at all, which makes it the quiet option on a Saturday when the market has the main drag closed and the fairgrounds are pulling traffic from the other direction.
None of this changes because a house down the street sold last month or because a new restaurant opened on Sandusky. It changes because the market got bigger than its sidewalks and the fair's dates happen to land on the same Saturday this year. Knowing both calendars, not just one, is what makes September in downtown Delaware easier to plan around.
If you already call Delaware County home, none of this needs an agent, just a decent read on two calendars. But if you are weighing a move here, or into any of the communities across Delaware and Franklin County, Anthony Rose Homes has spent years tracking exactly this kind of local detail. Let's Connect.
