PIERCETON – Sally Reuter will step down as organizer of Pierceton’s Heritage Gathering Primitive Show on Dec. 5.
Reuter said the show was started in 2008. After the town had done just a craft show and the person in charge didn’t want to do it anymore, Reuter was asked to take over. She changed the format of the show.
She started off with a vision. She named the show the Heritage Gathering Primitive Show because she had a shop in Pierceton named Country Heritage Primitives. Reuter used part of her shop’s name. The gathering part of the show’s name is from the friends she has accumulated over the years because she’s been in the business “a long time.” She said she asked if some of her friends wanted to do a show with her.
One of the things Reuter kept from the previous craft show when she took over was the date.
The upcoming show Dec. 4 is the show’s 13th year, which “includes COVID year, which we had to cancel.”
The show started with 13 vendors and the first year the show had 350 customers. In 2019, there were 34 vendors and 1,119 customers.
“So we have built this show up big time,” she said. “And the whole idea was not to necessarily have this big, successful show. It was to bring people into town and let them see all the shops that are in town. And it’s a huge success. This the biggest event in the shops’ year.”
Reuter said when the show got moved to Pierceton Elementary School, she had vendors that have been with her for a while and added new vendors off and on.
The show is a juried show, so not anyone can be a vendor at it. The vendors are picked out specifically due to good quality antiques and primitives. Vendors send in an application and pictures and she decides who gets to be in the show. She defined primitives as early American 1800s, it’s the dirty look, it’s the simplicity of things. For antiques, the show doesn’t have dishware. Reuter said the show has some vendors from Illinois, Ohio and a few years ago and there was a vendor from Tennessee.
To get the show going, Reuter said applications are sent out to vendors in May and those come back until the Aug. 15 deadline. At the end of August, she contacts Pierceton Elementary to make sure the gym is available for the first Saturday of December. September and October are advertising months and November is when signs are put out for the show. The day of the show, Reuter said, she has a lot of help from the Pierceton Chamber of Commerce.
For six or seven years, Reuter said she took over organizing the show, doing it all. She had a lot of energy, it didn’t bother her. Then she decided to delegate out the jobs that bogged her down.
“This is a two-year decision. That just hasn’t been a quickie, knee-jerk decision. I’ve done all I can for the show. I don’t have anything else to give,” Reuter said about her decision to step down. She has started a rug hooking event in Shipshewana and wants to focus more on that. She said it’s the third year she’s doing that and it’s successful.
Reuter said there’s been a lot of memories the show has given her and she’ll have a lot of them to take with her.
One of the memories Reuter shared about shows in years past included when the show was at the old school in Pierceton before it got torn. There were two rooms and she had music playing in one of the rooms. She was checking on things in the other room. When she got a break, she went into the room where the music was playing and was told she had to stop the music because the same song had been playing over and over again “and that was four or five hours in,” she said.
When Reuter asked what she will miss about the show, she said she will miss the vendors. Some of the vendors have been with the show for 13 years. She will also miss the customers because, “I just love taking to people and getting feedback from them and making them happy.”
When she leaves the show this year, Reuter said she is leaving a three-ring binder with instructions on how she did everything, an itinerary, an agenda and timeline. The Chamber can follow that or do whatever they decide. The Pierceton Chamber of Commerce hasn’t let Reuter know yet who is taking over the show after she leaves.
