Yard sale shoppers passed up – literally – this antique piano on their way to scoop up knickknacks, dated paperbacks and used clothing.
It’s a long way from Ohio to Signal Mountain, but that’s just why the two women from Ravenna make the trip every year during the first week of August.
“They don’t call it the world’s longest yard sale for nothing,” one joked this week as she browsed through a table stacked high with vintage spice jars and other items she said she remembered from her grandma’s kitchen in West Virginia.
“We’re worn out by the time we get back home, but we have so many ‘treasures’ it’s worth it,” she explained.
“You see things down here you never see up where we’re from.”
Her friend was distracted, still pining over an antique claw foot tub she’d spotted a few stops back. “I would kill for that tub,” she moaned, “but I don’t know how I’d ever get it home.”
Officially, the yard sale – which extends from Alabama to Michigan – lasts just four days, starting the first Thursday of August. Many dealers in Hamilton and Sequatchie counties, however, began setting up late last week and don’t plan to leave until Sunday or Monday.
The sale – with the frequent traffic jams that accompany it – is a mixed blessing to residents and businesses in the communities where it is held.
“Are you staying open for the world’s longest yard sale?” one shopper asked the woman behind the counter in a Dunlap thrift shop which normally is open only Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings.
“You mean the world’s biggest pain-in-the-neck yard sale?” the clerk sighed. Still, she said, she was considering opening.
“We’d get an awful lot of people in here if we did,” she said.