Correspondent photo / Chris McBride
Steffany Hitt, of Brookfield, left, and Amanda Miller, of Vienna, restock shelves Tuesday with candies at Sweet Memories Vintage Tees & Candy in Girard. The store recently expanded with the attached Golden Age Vintage Marketplace.
GIRARD — When Linda Barton launched a line of Good Humor T-shirts in 2020, she hoped to raise money for an infant bed at Akron Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
Six years later, that modest idea has grown into Sweet Memories Vintage Tees & Candy and, as of April, the attached Golden Age Vintage Marketplace, a 4,000-square-foot retail incubator supporting 36 small businesses in the Mahoning Valley.
Barton is the CEO of Sweet Memories, Vintage Teas, New Dawn Design, Golden Age Beverages and the new Golden Age Vintage Marketplace. She said the expansion reflects both her passion for local history and a desire to help other entrepreneurs avoid the isolation she once felt running her own companies.
“I honestly was just blown away that Good Humor is from Youngstown, and people didn’t advertise it,” Barton said. “People don’t know Klondike bars were invented here. They don’t know LIFE SAVERS were invented in Garrettsville. There’s just a lot of history here.”
What began as a screen-printing side project during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly expanded. One licensing deal with Good Humor led to more than 100 agreements with nostalgic brands including PEZ, Smarties, Dum-Dums, Sweethearts, Bit-O-Honey and Circus Peanuts.
Barton donated $5 from each Good Humor shirt to the NICU that had saved her daughter’s life years earlier.
In 2023 she opened a brick-and-mortar Sweet Memories store in Girard followed weeks later by a toy store expansion.
This month she cut the ribbon on the Golden Age Vintage Marketplace that transformed an underused warehouse space into a collaborative retail environment where small makers, artists and vendors can test products without the overhead costs.
The store operates daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The marketplace functions as a retail incubator. Vendors pay low-cost rent for booth space and gain access to the store’s foot traffic, marketing and infrastructure.
Barton said she deliberately designed the layout to avoid direct competition so no duplicate candle makers or overlapping product lines.
“We built here a little community where everybody is supporting each other because they’re all collaborating with each other versus competing,” she said.
One vendor, Christine Perunko of Wooden Nail, creates furniture, candle holders, book stands and birdhouses from reclaimed wood.
A retired graphic designer who once worked in printing, Perunko said she met Barton through photography work and was invited to view the raw space before it opened.”She described what she wanted, and a month later, here it is,” Perunko said. “She’s amazing. She’s so talented, inspiring, quick.”
Perunko shares her booth with a metal sculptor friend, blending wood and iron aesthetics. Like many vendors she had previously stacked finished pieces in her garage or gave them away as gifts. Now she said she has consistent retail space and a community of fellow makers.
Delaney Pallo, who began as a graphic design intern in June 2025 and now handles much of the company’s marketing and social media. She said customer reactions to the new marketplace often center on nostalgia and surprise.”I hear a lot of ‘I didn’t even know this was here,’” Pallo said. “And then, ‘Do you remember this? I remember this. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.’”
Pallo said that many vendors previously relied on weekend flea markets or pop-ups. The incubator model gives them a permanent staffed location to experiment with inventory and pricing while Barton handles the business infrastructure.
Maurice Scott of Youngstown Apparel has been making T-shirts for a decade with his brother. Their designs celebrate local landmarks and the city skyline.
Scott said he values the new opportunity to reach daily foot traffic in a space that feels aligned with his own community-focused ethos.
Barton’s emphasis on history runs through every part of the business.
She revived the Golden Age Beverages brand, which was founded in Youngstown in 1932 by Nathan Darsky, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in 1911 and built a regional soda empire after facing barriers with national brands like Coca-Cola.
The company eventually faded after a partnership with Pepsi.
Barton trademarked the name after discovering the mark had expired, and she began producing new sodas while preserving the original story.
The great-grandson of the founder later contacted her to thank her for carrying on the family legacy.”I wanted to just bring it back to life,” Barton said, “and carry on the memories that people had growing up… hearing so many stories about people sitting around the table Friday night and having their family pizza night and drinking Golden Age beverage.”
The marketplace also carries licensed Idora Park merchandise. The legendary Youngstown amusement park, which operated from 1899 to 1984 and was once known as the city’s “Million Dollar Playground” holds deep nostalgia for generations of residents.
Barton donates $5 from each Idora Park shirt to support preservation efforts.
Barton, a New Jersey native, is a second-generation Hungarian who has lived in the area for 30 years. She said her appreciation for history stems from growing up near Revolutionary War-era homes and from her grandmother’s insistence on recording family stories. An art major who once collected odd objects and turned them into mixed-media canvases, she describes herself as an “old soul” who enjoys taking old things and making them new again.She worries that without intentional effort, the Mahoning Valley risks losing its physical and cultural landmarks.
“If we don’t preserve history, then we forget who we are and where we come from,” Barton said. “Even though I’m not from here… it’s important to me to share those memories for other people.”The marketplace itself is designed like a museum. Historical information drawn from the local historical society lines the walls. Vintage candy, toys, novelties and Barton’s own line of nostalgic sodas fill the original Sweet Memories space, while the new marketplace offers one-of-a-kind handmade goods.
Barton views the project as a full-circle moment. After running a sports marketing business for 25 years that was shuttered by the pandemic, she pivoted to Sweet Memories. Now she is helping other small-business owners avoid the “one-woman army” struggle she once knew.”Our success is based on our partners’ successes,” she said. “We have vendors that have never had retail space. We have vendors that have been at the grind for 20, 30 years. … We have people in here that were in the Ward Bakery building that got condemned.”
For Barton, continued success means watching her 36 partners grow, some eventually moving into their own storefronts, others simply sustaining creative livelihoods they love.
The marketplace, she hopes, will become a regional destination and a place where families make new memories while learning about the old ones and where small businesses rise together rather than compete alone.
