Ask a longtime Eudora resident where the town center is and most will point to Main Street, past Zeb's Coffeehouse and the storefronts near 9th. That answer has been true for over a century. It's also getting less true every month.
Five miles east, off K-10 at the Church Street exit, sits a stretch of land that used to be Nottingham Elementary. For a decade it sat mostly empty. This September, it's running its own farmers market, hosting a movie night, and anchoring a puzzle competition, all while a developer works through the paperwork to build roughly 140 apartments around it. Main Street isn't going anywhere. But Eudora now has two places where people gather on a Tuesday night, and this fall is the first season where both are running at full volume at the same time.
The Tuesday Market Is Counting Down
The Eudora Farmers' Market wrapped its second full season this year, and the city's own market page confirms September is the last month before it goes dark until spring. Tuesday hours run 5:30 to 8 p.m. early in the season and shift to 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. as the light fades, with parking directed to the Community Center lot rather than along Elm Street. Beyond produce and prepared goods from producer-only vendors, the market runs a rotating lineup of lawn games each week, cornhole, giant Jenga, disc golf, plus other entertainment.
The market sets up next to the Community Center and the Village Green, the plaza area built as part of the old Nottingham redevelopment. That's worth sitting with for a second. A green space that didn't exist a few years ago is now the default location for a weekly gathering that used to have no fixed home in Eudora at all.
What Else Is Landing at Village Green This Fall
The city's Fall 2026 Parks and Recreation guide lists two more Village Green events alongside the market's final stretch: Puzzle-Palooza VIII and a showing of Hocus Pocus. Neither has a posted date yet as of this writing, but their placement in the same fall guide as the farmers market's closeout tells you something about how the city is treating that space. It's not an overflow lot anymore. It's programmed.
The same guide notes a new Youth Tennis Development Program launching this fall, on top of returning soccer, volleyball, and flag football. None of that happens at Village Green specifically, but it's more evidence that Eudora Parks and Rec is expanding its footprint at a pace that outstrips what the town needed even five years ago.
Here's the fall lineup as it currently stands:
- Eudora Farmers' Market — Tuesdays through September, Village Green area, final month of the 2026 season
- Main Street Market — second Thursday of the month at CPA Park, closing out the season in September
- Puzzle-Palooza VIII — Village Green, date to be announced
- Hocus Pocus screening — Village Green, date to be announced
- Youth Tennis Development Program — new this fall, registration through Parks and Rec
Main Street Isn't Sitting Still Either
The contrast only works because downtown is doing its own version of the same thing. The Main Street Market, a separate event from the Tuesday farmers market, runs the second Thursday of May through September at CPA Park on West 9th Street, with live music and food trucks. Last year's schedule closed on September 11, and the same second-Thursday cadence puts this year's final date in the same mid-September window, giving downtown its own countdown running in parallel with the one happening off K-10.
Downtown also picked up real square footage this year. The Eudora Thrift Store spent twelve years in a cramped building on Main Street before owner Andrea Starr moved the operation to a larger space at 112 E. 10th Street, next to Charritos Plaza. The old building's doorways weren't wide enough to accept furniture donations. The new one is big enough that Starr plans to start selling used appliances, something the shop physically couldn't do before.
A few blocks over, the old used car lot at Main and 10th, across from the Public Safety building, is inching toward becoming something new. Aaron Thakker, who also owns the building at 800 Main that once housed 800 Main Salon, has been working on a Main Street Food Park and Mini Golf concept for that lot. The project's own site is live and collecting signups for grand opening updates as of this summer, though no firm opening date has been announced. If it lands, it gives downtown its own version of the rotating food truck concept that Village Green already runs through the farmers market.
Why the K-10 Corner Got a Second Life
None of this happened by accident. The city bought the old Nottingham Elementary site and its surrounding fifteen acres back in 2015 for $850,000, hoping to eventually turn it into commercial ground. For years, growth there was slow. A Casey's General Store, a Wendy's, and a Scooter's Coffee opened, filling in some of the smaller lots, but the larger parcels sat undeveloped.
That changed last fall. In October 2025, the city annexed 134 acres nearby for future housing, and a few months later approved a sale agreement with Borchardt Development for the six remaining lots of Nottingham Center, an agreement worth roughly $1.6 million. The plan on the table calls for about 140 apartments, ten two story villas, and 50,000 square feet of retail and office space, built around the existing Village Green. Concept renderings show a corner cafe with a patio overlooking the green, along with pickleball courts and a pool for residents.
Michael Borchardt, who leads the development group and has lived in Eudora for several years, told the Eudora Times his goal is to build a small ecosystem around the green, somewhere people commute to Lawrence or Kansas City from but don't have to leave town to get a cup of coffee or see a friend. City manager Zack Daniel said last winter that he expected development agreement drafts to be ready for review by mid-2026, with due diligence on the land sale already underway at the time. It's still a proposal, not a finished neighborhood. But the fact that it's being drawn around an already functioning green space, rather than a blank field, is the reason Village Green already feels more alive than its official construction timeline would suggest.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Living Here
If you've been in Eudora a while, this fall gives you a real choice most Tuesdays and Thursdays that didn't exist a few years back. Head to the Village Green for the last stretch of Tuesday farmers market nights, or head downtown for the season's closing Main Street Market. Both are free, both run on food trucks and local vendors, and for the first time both have enough of an identity that neither one reads as the backup plan.
That's the quieter story underneath all the individual updates. Eudora isn't losing its Main Street character to a highway exit development. It's running two centers of gravity for the first time in its history, and this September happens to be the month where you can watch both of them pull a crowd on the same night of the week.
If you're curious how a corner of town filling in this fast tends to affect what a house nearby is worth, or you just want a straight answer about what's changing in your part of Eudora, Angela Zysk is happy to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation whenever it's useful.
