Horseshoe Market

On Saturday, September 19, 2026, the doors of the Highlands Masonic Center at 35th Avenue and Federal Boulevard opened at 10 a.m. on the Fall Horseshoe Market. Seventy Colorado makers, artists, and small businesses had set up across two full levels of the building, and admission was free. Local musicians played on both floors, Naked Dawn Duo in the morning and Presley Carmella in the afternoon. The first fifty people through the door each received a surprise goodie bag.

Two floors at 35th and Federal

The organizers say they often hear that the building can be “a little tricky to navigate,” with enough nooks and crannies that a shopper may wonder whether every room has been seen. For 2026 they introduced a paper passport. Each of the four market areas holds one small task: a stamp, a punch, or a line for contact information. A passport filled in all four places is entered in a drawing for $100 in cash and a Horseshoe Market T-shirt, and the winner is named at 4 p.m., when the market closes.

The hunt began before the doors opened. On September 17 and 18 the market hid four LuckyFind envelopes within two miles of the building, and on market day it hid three more inside. Each envelope held Horseshoe Bucks worth from $5 to $50, to be spent with the vendors.

In the weeks before the fall market, the organizers introduced ten of its makers:

• Concrete Poppy makes small-batch candles in what it calls “Burn to Bloom” plantable jars.
• Jane and Co. sets multi-layer pressed flowers into soft polymer clay and brass.
• Wild Solace layers landscape photographs with dried botanicals, hand stitching, and antique paper about a hundred years old.
• Harmony Bazaar sells South Asian-inspired jewelry hand-stamped and hammered from repurposed metals.
• Loom sells blankets and ponchos handwoven by five partner families in the Ecuadorian Sierra, with the colors and designs chosen in Colorado.
• Bohemian Blooms burns and paints designs into vegan suede hats.
• So Very Lovely makes laser-engraved wood pieces and miniature live air plants.
• Pardon My French blends scents from natural ingredients.
• Sierra’s Art Degree twists wire and beads into flowers.
• A Novel Affair Bookshop is a mobile romance bookshop.

Dogs come in with their owners.

Before the market, its own posts described the venue as Frank E. Edbrooke’s 1889 Masonic Temple, Richardsonian Romanesque in rock-faced red sandstone and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those posts placed that building at 16th and Welton, which is not the address the market uses. The market’s event listing gives 3550 Federal Blvd. A paid post placed by the market in September described that corner as the neighborhood where Horseshoe “first put down roots.”

Behind Olinger Chapel

The roots go back to Amy Yetman’s walks through the craft and flea markets of Boston and Chicago. Westword reported in 2014 that she wanted that kind of fair in Denver. “It was a little dream of mine,” she told the paper just after the first Horseshoe Market, held in the fall of 2010. “But I was always waiting for someone else to do it.”

She and her husband, Doug, started it together. Later accounts give further reasons:

• The recession. In 2020 Amy traced the market to the recession of 2008: “Sometimes when you feel like you have nothing, there’s also a sense of fearlessness and having nothing to lose.”
• Shopping and selling. Westword wrote in 2022 that the couple meant to combine thrift-store and flea-market shopping, and that the market gave Amy a way to expand the Etsy shop where she sold her vintage collections.
• Grit. To 5280 in 2019, Amy described the gritty flea market she felt Denver lacked: “The thing that’s fun about a flea market is to have some booths that aren’t perfectly curated. You kind of want to dig around a little.”

The market’s own About page is headed “Bringing Handmade Art to Denver Since 2014.” The newspapers, the Yetmans, and the market’s 2026 posts all give 2010.

For its first years the market met outdoors, in spring, summer, and fall, in the parking lot of Olinger Chapel in the Berkeley neighborhood. Amy hoped for a broad run of antique and vintage dealers, but 5280 reported that artisans and makers came to dominate the market over time. Westword named Horseshoe the Best Flea Market in its 2013 Best of Denver.

The fifth annual fall market was held on October 4, 2014, in the lot behind Olinger Moore Chapel near Berkeley Park, at 46th and Tennyson. It ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with 120 vendors and food trucks, selling handmade jewelry, antiques, salt caramels, and pizzas fresh from the oven. Amy said at the time that she also had three children under three. That December 13 and 14 the market went indoors for a holiday market at the Highlands Masonic Temple.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving

Two years later the holiday market at the temple drew a crowd. On November 26, 2016, Small Business Saturday, 85 vendors filled the building, now called the Highlands Masonic Lodge in The Denver Post’s account. Twenty more worked in a tent outside, sharing the front lawn with food trucks and live music.

Doug Yetman, then operations director, said a line had formed across the lawn and down the street by 9:30 a.m., half an hour before opening. He guessed that 3,000 to 3,500 people came before noon, and joked that there might be nothing left for Sunday. The Post’s reporter found it impossible to cross the hall without bumping into five people. Shoppers flipped through rock records at the Nomad Vinyl booth.

Kathy Lee of Modern Gingham Preserves made jams from local fruit trees that usually go unpicked. Her son came along to help with the customers. She said it would be her last time selling in person because she could not keep up with demand. When one regular walked up, Lee pointed her to the apple chai before the woman could speak. “I’m not done with jam,” Lee said. “I’m just done with retail.”

Jan Lahlun and MJ Lechner ate lunch on the Masonic steps. “We really came here to investigate every nook and cranny of this Masonic temple,” Lahlun said.

That year one of the first fifty swag bags each day held a golden horseshoe, good for $50 at any vendor. The Winter Market at the temple, held the weekend after Thanksgiving, is the event the market’s current owner says Horseshoe is best known for.

From the stadium lot to Regis

In the spring of 2019, the Yetmans learned that the Olinger lot was for sale. “We’ve loved being in Berkeley and it’s where Horseshoe was truly born,” Amy told 303 Magazine. “However, we didn’t want to just move to another church parking lot. After nine years of doing the same thing, we were itching to grow, follow some of our ‘flea market dreams’ and go really big.”

The bigger lot was one Amy had picked out years before. According to 5280, about six years earlier, while pregnant with twins, she had walked the asphalt around the Broncos’ stadium and noticed its size and its view of the Denver skyline. On May 11 and 12, 2019, the tenth season opened in the parking lot at Broncos Stadium at Mile High.

That market had about 200 vendors, among them some 60 “true vintage” dealers, which marked a return to Amy’s original vintage plan. A center tent held free creative workshops. On Saturday afternoon a live auction ran from 2 to 4. Admission was $5, and a portion of it went to Denver Urban Gardens.

The next spring the COVID-19 shutdown halted large outdoor events. Horseshoe held its spring market online, ran virtual markets on Instagram, and built a Shop Local directory linking shoppers to its vendors’ online stores. In those years the market also tested other formats:

• craft workshops
• retail pop-ups
• a short stay at Edgewater Public Market
• a combined farmers’ and flea market in Jefferson Park

Westword’s 2022 account of the Berkeley years differs from 5280’s. Westword says the market spent more than a decade in the Berkeley Chapel lot before the lot was bought and put into development, and that Regis University then offered its own parking lot.

The thirteenth season opened there on May 7, 2022, the day before Mother’s Day, in Lot 3 at 50th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard. It had 110 vendors, four food trucks, coffee, pastries, beer, cocktails, and live music. “No market is like the one before it,” Doug said.

A new owner

In September 2024 the Yetmans sold Horseshoe to Libby Pelican Seamans, a pediatric speech therapist who had stepped back from work to raise her two children. “My original plan was to apply at Trader Joe’s because everyone there seems so happy!” she told VoyageDenver. It was her husband who suggested buying a small business.

She spent the first months in what she calls “sponge mode,” learning from Doug and Amy, and began running the markets on her own in 2025. Doug said they sold because Yetman Farms needed more of his time. The farm is a four-acre flower farm in the Bear Creek Valley of southwest Lakewood, built on what had been a dilapidated horse property.

Seamans now chooses the venues, and she has dropped some of them. “We’ve listened when our community told us a venue didn’t quite meet expectations, and we haven’t gone back,” she said. The 2026 summer market met at Breckenridge Brewery in Littleton, where, by the market’s account, there was “always a cold Palisade Peach Wheat.”

The market’s schedule lists two more 2026 dates:

• November 28 and 29: Highlands Masonic Center
• December 5 and 6: Breckenridge Brewery, Littleton