Little Red Truck Vintage Market

At five o’clock on Friday, November 6, 2026, the barn at the Kleffner Ranch in East Helena, Montana, opens to shoppers. Booths fill the barn and the grounds around it. Food trucks park outside, and Tammie Jones is listed to play the Friday music. This is Holidays at the Kleffner, the fifth of six weekend markets the Little Red Truck Vintage Market holds in 2026, at 305 Montana Highway 518. The Southwest Montana travel guide counts over 60 booths, indoors and out. The market’s own site lists 75.

Friday evening is the Early Bird, from 5 to 8 p.m. The $10 ticket also admits the holder on Saturday, when the market runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for $5. Children 12 and under are free.

Six weekends, fairground to arena

The market travels. In 2026 it opened at the Missoula County Fairgrounds on March 20 and 21, went to Riley Arena in Cody, Wyoming, on May 8 and 9, and to the Gallatin County Fairgrounds in Bozeman on May 29 and 30. It filled Expopark in Great Falls on September 11 and 12. After the Kleffner it closes the year back in Missoula with the European Christmas Market on December 4 and 5. That market is held on the first Friday and Saturday of December. Most stops are in fairground buildings. The market’s vendor page names Buildings 1, 2 and 3 at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds and the Mercantile Building at Expopark.

The banner over all of it reads “Cottage, Collected & Artisan Goods.” At Great Falls in 2023, owner Janie Scheben explained the words. “Cottage would be a general term for not only style which is kind of a soft, nature, antiques kind of environment, but also cottage industry, so it’s kind of a play on both of those words,” she said. “Collected would be the vintage and antiques, because that is kind of going out, collecting, curating items that are hard to find that are old, and then artisan goods kind of speaks for itself.”

The market is juried. Scheben keeps the mix at about 45 percent vintage, 35 percent handmade work, and 20 percent specialty booths such as food and clothing. Anything artisan or edible must be made by the vendor who sells it, and direct-sales companies are not accepted. Specialty lines such as candles, soap and new clothing are held to one or two booths per market. The site lists the styles it takes as “Industrial, retro, traditional, farm fresh, European, MAN-tiques and the like.” Reporters at past markets found handcrafted jewelry, vintage Coca-Cola toys and pantry goods. Vendor fees pay for the advertising and the hall, and also for live music and what Scheben calls “extras (like Santa and facepainting).”

Candles, wedding money, and a kitten rescue

At the Great Falls market in September 2024, the second year the market had come to that city, KRTV counted 80 vendors. Shannon DeRudder, owner of Country Bumpkins and 406 Bum, had been making soy and coconut wax candles for nearly 20 years. “I can tell when something’s not the right kind of scent and when something is,” she said. “People don’t really know about my candles, but when they come in and they’ve bought one before, they always come back.”

Twenty feet away, Kaleb Adler was arranging antiques for M & K Creations, the business he runs with his wife. “It’s a thing me and my wife started to pay for our wedding and we’ve just kind of continued doing it ever since,” he said. KRTV reported that he likes to set pieces in context so a customer can see them in use.

At the Missoula County Fairgrounds on March 22, 2025, Heidi Schnarr, founder and president of Heidi’s Kitten Rescue, had a table. “It gives them exposure to lots of people that come through,” she said. Rayda Flint makes jewelry from vintage pieces. “I want to reuse some of this stuff that’s already here and beautiful,” she said. Julie Epperly, a bartender at the Rhinoceros Bar, said the bar had “made lots of great relationships with the vendors” and picked up business from them. Scheben estimated that more than half her vendors hold a regular job besides their booth. “And it helps with special things, like when you need tires or you’re going to buy a plane ticket,” she said.

A ‘66 Ford and a Missouri farm

Scheben lived in Missouri before her family moved to Montana when she was a girl. In January 2017 she wrote on the market’s blog about the name. “It’s no accident I chose to name my Market ‘Little Red Truck,’” she wrote. “My paternal grandfather drove a little red truck in the 60’s that looked very much like the ‘66 I drive today.” When she grips “that narrow, time-worn red steering wheel,” she wrote, she thinks of Sunday drives and of old tractors at their day’s work.

On her maternal grandfather’s farm, she and her cousins built rough cars from rusty nails, old tires, boxes and steering wheels found in the outbuildings. They raced them down the hill by the pond, which, she wrote, “resulted in a necessary tetanus shot one summer.” She went to farm auctions with her aunt and uncle. She remembered the auctioneers’ banter and the farmers in white T-shirts and overalls. She buys at auctions now for her antiques business, and she wrote that they take her back “just like that steering wheel in my hands.” In 2020 she told a Missoula reporter, “I think that’s where it was kind of first blooming.”

Before the market, Scheben spent more than 20 years selling at antique and artists’ markets around the Northwest. With her sister she ran an antique store in Missoula, where the two hand-painted furniture and did faux finishes and murals on site. On the vendor page she gives eight years to that boutique and adds a background in marketing. In 2020 KTVH reported that she worked Monday through Thursday for an endodontist, kept a booth in a Missoula antique mall, and spent her weekends at auctions and putting on markets, which she organizes alone. “It’s my hobby, it’s my love,” she said. “It is not a job for me.”

From 145 booths to an autumn in Great Falls

Scheben began in 2014 with the red truck. She toured western Montana with the cherry-red Ford, sold from it, and rented booth space to vendors with similar goods. By July 15 and 16, 2016, the Missoula County Fairgrounds market held 145 indoor and outdoor booths. Admission was $5, and part of the gate went to Summit for Parkinson’s. A photograph of b.e.AtHome’s Airstream booth at a summer show ran in the Readers Choice section of Flea Market Style magazine’s Spring and Summer issue, which reached the stands in February 2017. That spring the Missoulian named Scheben to a new Western Montana Fair advisory committee, describing her market as held twice a year at the Missoula County Fairgrounds.

By 2020 the calendar had grown to Missoula in April, Butte in July, Missoula again in September, and the December Christmas market. The September 5 market that year filled the fairgrounds’ commercial building with vendors from across the Northwest. Scheben thanked the Missoula County Health Department and the fairgrounds for working with her so the event could go ahead safely.

In September 2023 the market came to Great Falls for the first time, in the Trades & Industry building at Montana ExpoPark, with over 60 booths. That year Scheben listed Bozeman in February and Cody in the spring. “We just kind of try to pick a town we love and do the same time every year,” she said. When the market returned to Great Falls a year later she said it would come back at the same season every year. “I try to be in the same towns about the same time, so people can look forward to it and make it part of their annual event planning.”

The 2027 dates are already posted: Missoula on March 19 and 20, Bozeman on May 21 and 22, Great Falls on September 11 and 12, the Kleffner on November 5 and 6, and the European Christmas Market in Missoula on December 3 and 4.