At the corner of Highway 1 and 6th Street in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Back Porch Pickers and Artisans fills its 616 1st Avenue North storefront with booths from a rotating roster of independent vendors, the kind of multi-dealer setup that lets a single visit turn up antique treasures, handmade artisan goods, vinyl records, decorative stones and rocks, candy, and rugs all under one roof. The shop is open seven days a week, Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m., closing only for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, a schedule generous enough that shoppers rarely need to plan far ahead to catch it open. Complimentary parking at the highway-and-street corner location makes it an easy stop for anyone passing through this stretch of eastern Iowa.
Mount Vernon itself, a Linn County town of roughly 4,500 people in the Cedar Rapids metro area, has built a reputation well beyond its size. Budget Travel Magazine named it one of America’s coolest small towns in 2009, citing its coffee, food, and shop owners with purpose, and the town is also home to Cornell College, a small liberal arts college whose entire campus sits on the National Register of Historic Places. That combination, a walkable downtown, a college-town energy, and a community invested in independent retail, has helped support multi-vendor shops like Back Porch Pickers and Artisans, where the mix of antiques and handcrafted goods reflects the same kind of curated, locally rooted character the town is known for elsewhere.
What sets Back Porch Pickers and Artisans apart from a typical antique mall is the deliberate blend of old and new under a single roof. Alongside the expected secondhand and vintage finds, the shop makes room for handmade artisan work, meaning shoppers browsing for a piece of local craft can find it a few booths away from a stack of vinyl albums or a bin of collectible stones. Reviewers describe the layout as clean and well organized with wide aisles, note that it is handicap accessible, and specifically call out that it lacks the musty smell that can characterize older antique malls, a detail that matters to shoppers who spend extended time browsing multiple booths in one visit. That reputation has translated into a 4.8-star rating across more than fifty Google reviews, an unusually strong showing for a multi-vendor resale shop.
The shop’s connection to the surrounding vendor community also extends beyond its regular booth turnover. Mount Vernon’s own history as a small but design-conscious, artisan-friendly town, reinforced by events like the town’s large annual chalk art festival each May, gives a shop built around handmade and vintage goods a natural audience of both locals and visitors drawn to the area for its creative reputation. Staff at Back Porch Pickers and Artisans are noted for helping customers navigate the booths and coordinating directly with vendors on questions about specific items, a level of service that larger, less personal antique malls do not always match.
Back Porch Pickers and Artisans is a multi-vendor shop in Mount Vernon, Iowa offering antiques, handmade artisan goods, vinyl records, and other curated finds seven days a week, giving shoppers in the Cedar Rapids area a well-reviewed, easily accessible stop that blends vintage treasure-hunting with locally made craft.
