In tiny Orrville — a town with one traffic light and about 150 people in the heart of Alabama’s fertile Black Belt — Judy McKinney is championing her own, homegrown farm-to-table food movement.

McKinney’s Orrville Farmers Market is a one-stop shop where local farmers can not only buy their seeds and supplies but come back and sell their crops, some of which are also featured on the menu at the market’s hot bar.

“We have all the seeds that farmers can come and purchase to grow their gardens,” McKinney says. “Then they can turn around and sell it to us. And we either sell it to our customers as they come in (the market), or we make it part of your lunch — or your breakfast, whichever the case may be.”

You’re not likely to find a fresher meat-and-three meal anywhere around.

“If you’re at the farmers market in the morning,” McKinney says, “you’ll see the cooks come out into the front of the store, grabbing fresh Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbages, bell peppers – all the ingredients they need to cook that day’s menu.”

Located along a two-lane stretch of Alabama Highway 22 in rural Dallas County, Orrville is one of those places that’s both off the beaten path and in the middle of everything.

For history buffs, Old Cahawba, a ghost town that was once the first capital of Alabama, is just down the road, and Selma, the former Civil War and Civil Rights battleground, is about 15 minutes away.

And for hunters and anglers, this is also prime deer- and turkey-hunting country, as well as home to some of the state’s best bass and catfish fishing on the nearby Alabama River.

The Orrville Farmers Market is a little oasis in the midst of all that, a general store with a restaurant attached that is the hub of small-town life for the local folks and a destination side trip for tourists traveling through the Black Belt.

Jean Watson and her sister Sydney Chasteen, for instance, have made the 45-minute drive from Newburn, in neighboring Hale County, to meet their lifelong friend Janet Gresham, who lives in Valley Grande, outside Selma, for a Friday lunch.

Between the three of them, they’ve ordered fried catfish, hamburger steak, baked chicken, green beans, rice and gravy, black-eyed peas and peach cobbler.

“Only at the farmers market does it count as a vegetable,” Watson says of her cobbler.

She and her husband, Byron, own a hunting camp about five miles from Orrville, and they often stop at the farmers market for lunch on their way to the camp.

“You bring a hungry husband by when you don’t want to cook,” Watson says. “That’s a good reason to stop.”

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‘A really cool area for a farmers market’

Judy and Erwin McKinney put down roots in Orrville after moving here from central Florida about 17 years ago.

Erwin grew up raising cattle and growing row crops on his parents’ farm and followed them into the farming business. Judy worked in promotion and marketing, experience that would later come in handy when they opened the farmers market.

The McKinneys came here to expand their Dallas County Seed Co., which grows, harvests and processes oats, wheat, soybeans and corn and sells it to farmers throughout West Alabama — as well as Pensacola Bahiagrass Seed, which they ship to customers around the globe.

Their house is two blocks from the farmers market, and they own a thousand-acre farm about three miles outside of town.

“It’s nice because we’re all within a stone’s throw of each other,” Judy McKinney says.

Ten years ago, the family that owned a seed business in Orrville approached the McKinneys about buying their business and the building along with it.

The old building, in the shadows of the town water tower, dates to the 1850s, Judy McKinney says, and, in its previous lives, it had been home to everything from a country store to a women’s dress shop to an automobile repair shop.

The McKinneys bought it to process and store dried grains for their agriculture business.

Then they had another idea.

“Turning that building into a farmers market was actually a secondary thought,” Judy McKinney says. “We’ve got this really cool space. Now what do we do with it?

“We always thought Orrville would be a really cool area for a farmers market,” she continues. “It’s just a small, unique area that’s filled with all these farmers.”

Not to mention, despite its proximity to all that rich farmland, the town was otherwise in a food desert.

“There (was) no place within 15 to 20 miles to get fresh fruits and vegetables,” McKinney says. “There (was) no place to get anything to eat.”

‘Two pop-up tents and a sign’

So, around 2015, McKinney and her friend Kelly McLendon set up shop along Orrville’s main drag and started selling cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, zucchini and other vegetables they grew in their respective gardens.

“She had a pop-up tent. I had a pop-up tent,” McKinney recalls. “We both had gardens in our backyard. We both raised chickens. We started selling everything that was in our gardens, setting up two or three days a week in front of the building.

“So, when I tell people that it actually started as two pop-up tents and a sign, I can’t be more honest.”

Business was steady but not brisk. They needed something to lure more folks off the highway as they passed through town.

McKinney recalls: “On the dining room table, we started laying out plans: ‘What if we made this bigger? What if we had a little hot bar so that people could pick up a fresh meal? A place where people could buy their seeds and grow their gardens?’”

They spent a year renovating the building, and a few weeks before they got ready to open, they hired JoJo Lewis, who had run a meat-and-three business in the unincorporated Dallas County community of Sardis, to be their head cook.

“My husband farmed out in the area where she was, and she used to trade him lunches for hay because she needed hay for her goats,” McKinney says. “We approached her, and I think she thought we were crazy. . . .

“She was an amazing cook, and she brought her twin sister (Mary McCants), who’s also an amazing cook, with her,” McKinney adds. “We started with a five-foot hot bar.”

‘A lot of come-to-Jesus meetings’

At the time, the farmers market only had three picnic tables out front, so most of the customers got their meals to go.

But within a few weeks, McKinney started getting requests from large groups who wanted to book the farmers market for luncheons and dinners.

With no place to seat them, her husband knocked out an opening to the abandoned movie theater that adjoined the building and converted that space into a dining room and event venue, where they now host business lunches, wedding receptions and birthday celebrations.

“We truly (opened) on a wing and a prayer,” McKinney says. “I tease and tell a story that me and God used to have a lot of come-to-Jesus meetings on my living room floor.

“We just kept plugging along,” she adds. “I just couldn’t fathom that I was put on this path to fail. Failing wasn’t an option. And it’s grown in areas that I never dreamed.

“But it’s definitely been a ‘we,’ not a ‘me.’ I’ve just been surrounded by a really great group of people that have helped bring it to life.”

Every April, to kick off the start of the planting season, the farmers market hosts its annual Spring Shindig, with grilled ribeye steaks, a loaded baked potato bar and live music.

Then, in the fall, to celebrate the autumn harvest and the start of hunting season, the market puts on its Hoedown Throwdown, with more steaks, more potatoes and more music.

“It’s post-harvest season, and it’s time to throw your hoe down and come have a ribeye steak,” McKinney says. “It also kicks off hunting season in this area, which is big to the community.”

‘Literally, people all over the world’

These days, nearly eight years after it opened for business in November 2016, the Orrville Farmers Market is no longer a place people drive by on their way to somewhere else, but one where they stop and stay awhile.

“How they find us, I’m not sure, but I’m so grateful that they do,” McKinney says. “Literally, people all over the world (come here), and I think it has a lot to do with just being so entrenched in the Black Belt.”

Depending on what’s in season, the farmers market offers strawberries and peaches from Sugar Hill Farms in Verbena, watermelons and cantaloupes from Ingram Farms in Pansey, and potatoes and squash from McLendon Farms here in Orrville.

The general store sells such made-in-Alabama food products as Conecuh Sausage, Millie Ray’s rolls, Joyce’s Cheese Straws, Smokehouse Crackers, R.E.D.’s Gozillionaire Sauce and cakes from The Slice Queen in Selma — as well as their own Orrville Farmers Market-branded pancake and cobbler mixes.

Those hearty breakfasts and homegrown lunches – which are served Tuesdays through Saturdays – are the main attraction, though.

Favorites on the lunch menu include turnip greens, butterbeans, purple-hull peas, candied yams, meatloaf, fried chicken and, on Fridays, fried catfish from Harvest Select in nearby Uniontown.

McKinney gives all the credit for the food to Sharron James, who took over the cooking duties after JoJo Lewis left to take care of her husband and after her sister, Mary McCants, retired.

In another divine moment in the Orrville Farmers Market’s blessed history, McKinney met James on a random trip to Dollar General about five years ago.

“I tell people it was a total God thing because I just happened to walk into Dollar General that day, and this woman looks at me and says, ‘Do y’all need any help at the farmers market?’” McKinney recalls.

“She started working for me full-time, and she’s been with me ever since,” McKinney adds. “She and I are just a great team, and we both respect each other so much.”

The Orrville Farmers Market is at 14560 Alabama Highway 22 in Orrville, Ala. The phone is 334-996-8301. The market is open for breakfast from 7 to 10 a.m. and for lunch from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information, go here.