Founders Terrace Filled In While Hobart's Farmers Market Picked Up And Moved

Eighteen months ago, Founders Terrace wasn't an address anyone in Hobart used for anything. It was frontage along the Centennial Centre Business Park, the kind of parcel that shows up on a plat map before it shows up on a errand list. Then a metal fabrication company from just down the road decided to build there, and a Saturday-afternoon institution that has nothing to do with that development decided, on its own schedule, to relocate too. Neither change required a resident to move a single mile. Both changed where residents actually go.

A Farm Field Became Four Storefronts In About A Year

The address is 4999 Founders Terrace, and the building on it is Folkman Plaza, a 10,652-square-foot structure that broke ground in late June 2024 and had its ribbon cutting in early May 2025, according to The Business News. The plaza belongs to Justin and Alan Folkman, a father-son team who run Folkman Inc., a Hobart-based metal fabrication shop that ships work as far as Hawaii and Djibouti. Building a retail plaza wasn't their usual line of business. It was, in Justin Folkman's own words, a project where "we went from basically a farm field to a 10,000-plus square-foot building."

The four suites filled in over the following months, not all at once:

That's four businesses on one corner in roughly a year and a half, on a lot that was farmland before the Folkmans broke ground. Village Administrator Aaron Kramer, who told The Business News he walks past the site most mornings around 5:45, put it plainly:

"If you blink now, the site will look different when you open your eyes."

Why A Car Wash Came With A Coffee Shop Attached

The sequencing wasn't an accident. The Wash Shack went in first because it's the kind of business that generates its own traffic, cars arriving on a schedule whether or not anyone planned an errand around it. Justin Folkman built the retail suites specifically to capture that traffic rather than compete for it. "The unique thing about this car wash is it's attached to about 5,000 square feet of retail space," he said when the plaza opened, noting other car washes in the area don't generate the same foot traffic on their own.

Wisco Sips picked up on that logic when it chose Founders Terrace for its second location, following its original spot on Elm View Road on Green Bay's east side. The Hobart shop runs a drive-thru alongside indoor seating, with hours that start at 6 a.m. on weekdays and stretch to 5:30 p.m., a schedule built around commuters rather than weekend browsers, per Fox 11's coverage of the opening. Folkman has also floated a food truck lot on the remaining pad, informally named "The Yard," with a different truck parked there each night of the week. That piece hadn't materialized as of the plaza's most recent public update, but it's the plan the ownership has been building toward since the car wash went in.

None of this required a resident to drive across town for something new. It required Founders Terrace to become a place worth stopping, and that took a specific sequence: traffic first, then the businesses that live off traffic.

The Farmers Market Didn't Wait For Anyone's Development Plan

While Founders Terrace was filling in according to a builder's logic, Hobart's other weekly gathering spot moved on a logic of its own. The Hobart Farmers Market relaunched its 2026 season at a new address and a new time, landing on Saturdays from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Book Village Inn starting Memorial Day weekend. The market's own announcement describes the change as a shift to Saturday afternoons, worded as though whatever slot anchored the market before wasn't Saturday, and wasn't afternoon either.

The organizers frame the new venue as putting the market inside what they call the community's most recognizable destination, and they're explicit about who they're trying to reach with the later start time: residents finishing a Saturday errand run, weekend visitors, and second-home owners who wouldn't have caught a weekday-morning market. It's a small operational choice, but it changes the answer to a question every Hobart household eventually asks someone new to the area: where do you actually run into your neighbors on a Saturday.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

Hobart didn't inherit a Main Street. It was farmland and town roads through most of its history, part of the historic Oneida reservation allotments before it incorporated as a town in 1908 and didn't become a village until 2002. There was never an old commercial core to slowly refill, the way a lot of Wisconsin communities have one storefront row that's been the answer to "where do I go" for a century. What Hobart has instead is a population of around 11,000 residents and a habit of answering that question freshly, corner by corner, whenever someone builds something people want to stop for.

That's not a complaint. It's just the mechanic behind why the map keeps moving. Founders Terrace answered the coffee-and-errand version of the question in about eighteen months, driven by a family manufacturing business that decided a car wash needed a reason for people to linger. The farmers market answered the neighbor-to-neighbor version of the question on its own timeline, unconnected to any zoning district, landing at a venue its own organizers picked for accessibility rather than any development plan.

If you've lived in Hobart for a while, both of those answers changed on you this year. The place you'd point a new neighbor toward for coffee is different than it was in 2024. The day and address you'd give someone for the farmers market is different than it was last spring. Neither change asked your permission, and neither will be the last one. That's what living in a village that's still deciding what it is actually looks like week to week, not in a headline about growth, but in where you happen to end up running your Saturday errands.

If you're weighing what that kind of ongoing change means for a property you own or one you're watching in Hobart, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these corners for a living. Becky Buckland and the Real Estate Collaborative team keep an eye on exactly this kind of shift across Northeast Wisconsin. Request a personalized consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what it means for you.