Most Tuesday evenings from May through mid-September, the lot along Laubach Avenue fills up for one reason. Folding tables go up under the pavilions next to the borough playground, someone's grill starts running, and for three hours the block smells like whatever's in season. Anyone who has lived in Northampton for more than a summer has parked here without thinking twice about the building sitting directly across the street.
That building is worth a second look, because twice a month it stops being the place where you'd go to pay a water bill and becomes something else entirely.
One Parking Lot, Three Different Calendars
The address is 1401 Laubach Avenue. It's the Northampton Borough Municipal Building, and on paper that's all it is: offices, meeting rooms, the kind of place that runs on business hours. The Northampton Borough Farmers' Market sets up right across from it every Tuesday from May to mid-September, 3 to 6 p.m., rain or shine, under cover.
But the same building also houses the Atlas Cement Company Memorial Museum, and that part of it only exists to the public on a much stranger schedule. Here's how the two compare across a typical season:
| What's open | Day | Hours | Season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Farmers' Market | Every Tuesday | 3–6 p.m. | May through mid-September |
| Atlas Cement Museum | 2nd and 4th Sunday | 1–3 p.m. | May through Sept. 20, 2026 |
Do the math and the market runs something like 60 open hours across the season. The museum runs about 16, spread across roughly eight Sundays, two hours at a time. If you've never walked through it, that's the reason. It isn't hidden. It's just open on a schedule that assumes you already know to check.
Four Hours A Month, Eight Million Barrels Of History
The museum is free, and it is also the only Portland cement museum in the country. It was founded in 1997 by Ed Pany, and the collection he built now runs to more than 2,000 artifacts, everything from company photographs to a giant model railroad car built to help the company patent its unloading process.
What the museum is actually preserving is the story of a plant that once employed more than 5,000 workers across five separate facilities built between 1889 and the closing of the last one in 1982. The scale of what those plants shipped out is the part that tends to stop people mid-sentence.
Eight million barrels of Atlas cement went into the Panama Canal. Another 151,000 barrels built the Empire State Building. Rockefeller Center took 450,000 more.
Those figures come straight from the museum itself, and they're the kind of thing that's easy to drive past a hundred times without ever knowing. The plant that made all three of those places possible sat here, on land that's now mostly residential streets and a municipal parking lot.
The Market Runs Longer, But The Museum Explains More
None of this is a knock on the market. It's the more useful of the two most weeks of the year, and it should be. Fresh produce, baked goods, and jars of something homemade are a better use of a Tuesday evening than most alternatives.
But the museum is the piece that explains why the town looks the way it does. Northampton's street grid, its older housing stock, even the local school mascot nickname, the "Konkrete Kid," all trace back to a company that doesn't exist anymore. You can walk past that history at the farmers market fifteen times a summer and never once notice the door that leads to it, because that door is only unlocked on two specific Sunday afternoons a month, for two hours each.
If you're the kind of person who plans a weekend around what's open, the fix is simple. Check the calendar before you check the market schedule, not after.
The Trail That Turns The Block Into A Loop
The same corridor that put the museum and the market within sight of each other also connects to something bigger a few blocks away. The Nor-Bath Trail shares its trailhead with the D&L Trail at the southern tip of Canal Street Park, and from there it runs straight past what one trail guide calls the town's "government center," which includes the Atlas Cement Co. Memorial Museum itself, the Northampton Recreation Center, and the Atlas Sports Complex, before the pavement gives way to farmland and woods.
Keep going and at roughly two and a half to three miles out you hit Bicentennial Park, a 64-acre municipal park owned and managed by East Allen Township, with restrooms, pavilions, playgrounds, tennis courts, and a full run of ball fields. From there the trail threads through more open farmland toward Bath, ending near Jacksonville Park.
The trail itself follows the old corridor of the Northampton and Bath Railroad, a short-line that ran 8.5 miles between the two towns for 77 years carrying the same cement industry the museum documents out to larger rail lines, before falling out of use in 1979. A one-mile asphalt extension added in 2017 tied it into the D&L Trail, which is why you can now start at that same Laubach Avenue corridor and end up in open farmland without crossing much in the way of traffic.
If you're measuring the ride, expect some disagreement depending on the source. Wikipedia lists the full corridor at 5.9 miles. The state's own trail database counts a shorter 5.1-mile core segment. Neither is wrong exactly, they're just measuring from different ends of the same rail bed, which is the kind of detail you only notice once you've ridden it more than once.
What This Actually Adds Up To
None of these three things, the market, the museum, or the trail, would make a headline on its own. What makes the corner of Laubach Avenue worth paying attention to is that all three sit within a few blocks of each other, tied together by a railroad that shaped the town before most of the current housing stock existed. You can spend a Tuesday evening at the market, a Sunday afternoon twice a month at the museum, and a weekend morning on the trail, and never leave a stretch of road most people drive through without a second look.
That's the part worth knowing if you already call Northampton home. The town's most interesting corner isn't hiding. It's just running on a schedule that rewards people who bother to check twice.
If you're thinking about what a summer here actually looks like, or you're weighing a move into Northampton and want someone who can talk through the borough block by block, Cass Chies has spent years working this market and knows it past the surface. Let's connect.
