Ossineke Finally Has a Second Saturday, and It Isn't at Dinosaur Gardens
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Ask most people driving US-23 what they know about Ossineke, and they'll mention the dinosaurs. Fair enough. Paul Domke started pouring concrete over steel frames back in 1935, and the roadside menagerie he built in a drained swamp along the Devil River has outlasted just about every other attraction like it in the country. But treating Ossineke as the exit ramp before the dinosaurs misses what's actually been building in town over the past two years. A shop owner packed up his business in downtown Alpena and moved it here instead, then started a monthly market that didn't exist before. A cafe family that has run the same lunch counter for three decades bought the town's most famous landmark and has been quietly reinvesting in it every year since. That's a different story than "cute stop on the way somewhere else."
Tim and Meg Allen ran Chippewa Valley Leatherworks, a handmade leather goods and vintage clothing shop, out of a storefront on North 2nd Avenue in downtown Alpena starting in 2019. In 2024, they moved the operation south to Ossineke, setting up shop at 11924 US-23 South, right next to the post office. That's a move most retail advice would call backward. Downtown Alpena has foot traffic. A stretch of highway next to a post office does not.
Allen didn't just relocate. He started something. In the summer of 2024, he launched Second Saturdays, an artisan and antique market held in the parking lot beside the post office, just north of where Nicholson Hill Road meets US-23. According to The Alpena News, Allen built the concept around something he'd seen work in Kansas City: a mixed market where antique dealers, refurbishers, and artisans set up alongside each other rather than each running their own separate event. Within 48 hours of announcing the first one, he had food trucks, musicians, and a classic car show lined up.
Allen also painted a mural on the side of his shop, a reproduction of a 1940s Ossie Beverages bottle. Ossie Beverages was a soda company once bottled right there in Ossineke, a piece of the town's own commercial history that had mostly disappeared. Allen told the paper he'd taken the image straight off an old glass bottle.
"It used to be made and bottled right in Ossineke, so I took an image off an old 1940s glass bottle and painted it on the wall."
That's the part worth sitting with. Allen isn't importing an idea from somewhere else and dropping it into Ossineke. He's pulling from the town's own forgotten identity and putting it back on display, then building a recurring event around it. He also said he hopes to eventually revive something like the old Ossineke Old Fashioned Days, a nod to the kind of gathering the town used to have and, in his view, should have again.
Dinosaur Gardens has changed hands only a handful of times since Domke opened it. Gary and Connie Stephan, who bought the park in the winter of 2013, are only the fourth owners in its ninety-year history. They weren't dinosaur people. They were cafe people. Connie's Café, just down the road at 11585 US-23 South, had been theirs for over three decades by the time the park's previous owner, a cafe regular, asked if they'd take it over.
What's happened since is a pattern of small, steady reinvestment rather than one big renovation. The Stephans added an elevated sandbox for fossil digging. They built a miner's sluice where visitors sift for gems and shark teeth. They put in a covered pavilion for parties. In 2024, they installed a sound system with six speaker points along the walking trail, piping in custom dinosaur sounds and instrumentals. Gary Stephan told The Alpena News the goal was simple:
"It is important to us to both preserve the park and find ways for new generations to enjoy it for years to come."
Last year, the park marked its 90th anniversary, ninety years since Domke's first display went up in 1935. The Stephans marked the milestone with a picnic lunch, a guided history tour, and a visit from a traveling paleontologist known as Paleo Joe, who brought fossil casts and talked visitors through the science the original park never had access to. It's a small thing, but it says something that the current owners chose to frame the anniversary around education rather than nostalgia alone.
The park runs seasonally, open daily from Memorial Day through Labor Day, then weekends only into the fall. It's the kind of business that could easily coast on being a novelty. Instead it keeps adding reasons to come back more than once a summer.
Put the market and the park together with what's already here, and a Saturday in town has more shape to it than the highway suggests.
Add the annual Shin-ga-ba Shores Carnival, held across the highway from Dinosaur Gardens each summer, which returned again this year on June 28 with games, raffles, live music, and food, all benefiting local children and families, and the picture that emerges isn't a pass-through town. It's a town with its own calendar.
None of this is happening because a developer decided Ossineke needed activating, or because a tourism board manufactured an event to drive traffic. It's happening because a leather goods maker chose to move his shop south instead of staying downtown, and because a cafe-owning family decided the right move when a landmark came up for sale was to keep investing in it rather than sell it for parts or let it fade. Both bets required believing the town itself was worth building around, not just passing through.
That's useful to know if you're weighing towns along this stretch of US-23, but it's just as useful if you already call Ossineke home and haven't been down to the post office lot on a Saturday morning yet, or haven't walked the Pathway loop since the leaves were still down. The dinosaurs aren't going anywhere. Neither, it seems, is everything that's grown up around them.
If you're thinking about property in Ossineke or anywhere else along the Alpena to Presque Isle corridor, Eric Arnoldi knows this stretch of US-23 the way only someone who lives nearby can. Let's Connect.
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