What the antique trade saved from Saint Jo's courthouse square.

The Saint Jo courthouse square has been a working commercial block since 1883, when the town was platted around the county seat that never came. Montague kept the courthouse, but Saint Jo kept the square — and for 140 years it has found something to fill it.

The hardware store left in 1994. For a year, the building sat empty and everything in town started to feel like it might do the same. Then Vera and Clint Hutchins signed a thirty-year lease on the corner building and opened what became the anchor of what is now an eleven-dealer antique district spread across four of the square's six commercial buildings.

What the Hutchinses figured out — and what the dealers who followed them figured out — was that an antique market on a working square is a different product than an antique mall on a highway. People drive to a highway mall with a specific purpose. People drive to Saint Jo for the square itself, and then they spend money because they're already there.

The square now draws roughly 4,000 visitors on the first weekend of each month during the spring and fall seasons. The dealers rotate a third of their inventory each month to give repeat visitors new reasons to come back. Three of the eleven dealers — Vera Hutchins, a retired schoolteacher named Darlene Pryor, and a man who goes by Tex — have been on the square continuously for more than twenty years.

The city keeps the square maintained: fresh crosswalk paint, working streetlights, clean sidewalks. In exchange, the dealers collectively pay a voluntary improvement fee that the city matches dollar for dollar. The fund has repainted the gazebo twice and replaced the square's iron benches once since 2010.

The coffee window in the corner building — added in 2019 by Vera Hutchins's daughter — is now the square's biggest single draw on weekend mornings. It has its own Instagram following and a wait list for the cinnamon roll, which sells out by 9 a.m.