Walk past 131 East Main Street this week and you'll find dark windows where a brewery used to be. No sign in progress, no butcher paper over the glass with a promise of something new. Just the kind of quiet that settles into a storefront after fifteen years of people showing up.
That was Rail Hop'n Brewing, and its last pour was June 30. A few miles away on Lea Hill, something almost the opposite happened a few weeks earlier. A garden that's been growing since 1968 got a guarantee that it will never disappear the way Rail Hop'n did. Same city, same year, two completely different outcomes for two places people loved. The reason comes down to something as unglamorous as a deed.
Fifteen Years, Three Addresses, No Deed
Rail Hop'n started the way a lot of good Auburn stories start, in a garage. Billy Jack Newman was a home brewer who liked cooking and figured beer was just another thing to season. His wife Kristi, whose family has been in Auburn for five generations, watched the hobby turn into a business and then into a name that mattered: Rail Hop'n, chosen to honor her grandfather Edward Sluys, who came to Auburn as a teenager to work for the railroad and later became a captain in the old Auburn Fire Department.
The garage tap room ran for five years before a partner left in 2014 and the Newmans rebuilt the brand from there. They eventually landed at 122 West Main Street, all railroad memorabilia and hand built tables, then relocated again to 131 East Main hoping the move would help the business keep growing. Instead, the owners hit a wall of construction disruption around the new location, permitting delays, and a landlord who decided to sell the building out from under them.
In their goodbye post, Kristi and Billy Jack wrote, "After 15 incredible years, the time has come for us to say goodbye." Fifteen years, three locations, and at no point did Rail Hop'n own the ground it stood on. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should.
A Different Ending on Lea Hill
Soos Creek Botanical Garden has a similar origin story to Rail Hop'n's, minus the ending. Ole Evensen Oie bought 160 acres from the Northern Pacific Railroad back in 1891 for about ten dollars an acre. Decades later, a five acre piece of that land passed to Maurice Skagen's parents, who deeded it to him in 1968. Skagen and his partner Jim Daly spent close to sixty years adding 17 more adjoining acres, planting stroll gardens inspired by England and Japan, and opening the whole thing to the public for free.
This past May, the City of Auburn completed a conservation purchase of that land. The garden itself hasn't changed. It's still run day to day by the Soos Creek Botanical Garden Foundation, still free to walk, still hosting the same mix of programming that's made it a fixture on the Soos Creek Plateau. What changed is who holds the title. Skagen told the Auburn Reporter the plan had been in motion since the beginning: the garden was always meant to become "a permanent gift to the community." Now it legally is one. The property can't be sold out from under the Foundation the way Rail Hop'n's building was sold out from under the Newmans, because the city itself owns the ground.
The Deed Is the Difference
This is the part of the story that's easy to miss if you only read the closure notice or the ribbon-cutting announcement separately. Auburn didn't lose a brewery and gain a garden by accident. It lost a business that never controlled its own real estate, and it protected a nonprofit precisely by moving the real estate into public hands.
That's not a small distinction if you care about which parts of Auburn stick around. The city's own economic development materials for Main Street point to real demand for more sit down restaurants, wine bars, and casual gathering spots close to home, the same role Rail Hop'n played for fifteen years. But wanting more of something and being able to keep the version you already have are different problems, and Rail Hop'n's ending shows how a beloved local business can do everything right with its customers and still lose the lease war. Soos Creek's story shows the other path: when a founder and a city align on keeping land in public trust, disruption from a single landlord's decision stops being an existential threat.
What's Still Open This Month
The garden's protection means its programming keeps rolling. Emerald Theatre's Theatre in the Garden series has staged outdoor productions at Soos Creek for years, this season's being Kate Hamill's stage adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma." The Auburn Symphony's string quartet also returns for Strings in the Garden, one of the summer traditions the Foundation lists among its favorites, and a six week yoga series in the Pavilion by the Pond wraps up its final class on September 2.
A few blocks downtown, the Auburn Farmers Market is closing out its own season on a high note. Now in its 18th year at Les Gove Park, the market pulls an average of 2,150 shoppers per Sunday, with visitors spending about $14 per person on everything from Contrivance Wine & Mead to fresh produce. It wraps for the year on September 20 with the 4th Annual Multicultural Community Festival, run in partnership with the city's Office of Equity, Engagement, and Outreach, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The market has run every June through September for eighteen straight years at the same park. Rail Hop'n ran for fifteen years across three different addresses. That contrast, a market that never had to move against one that never stopped moving, tells you something about how location stability shapes which local institutions become traditions.
One More Detour Downtown
If you're heading to any of this, budget extra time getting there. Sound Transit has been closing A Street NW between 1st Street NW and 2nd Street NW every day from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. since August 3, and the closure runs through October 30 for underground utility work near Auburn Station. Local access stays open for residents and businesses, but street parking and sidewalks in that stretch are affected, which matters if your usual route downtown runs anywhere near the station.
None of these four things, the brewery's closure, the garden's new deed, the market's closing festival, or the road work, happened in isolation. They're all playing out on the same few blocks of Auburn this September, and together they say something worth sitting with: the businesses and public spaces that last here aren't necessarily the ones with the most loyal customers. They're the ones that figured out, one way or another, how to stop depending on someone else's decision to sell the building.
If you've been in Auburn long enough to remember Rail Hop'n's garage days, or you've never made it out to Soos Creek and didn't realize it was minutes from downtown, this is a good month to close that gap. Make the market's last Sunday on the 20th, walk the garden while the light's still doing what September light does on Lea Hill, and plan around A Street until the closure lifts at the end of October.
If you're the kind of person who reads a story like this and starts wondering what your own corner of Auburn is worth, or whether now's the right season to make a move here, that's a different conversation, and one Abby Quinto has most days of the week. Reach out anytime to schedule a consultation.
