Sale Stretching 630 Miles Along U.S. 127 Officially Begins Thursday
by Judy Frank
posted August 6, 2008
) Photo by Wes Schultz Sassie shows off some of her treasures |
But try telling that to the employees at Sassie’s in Dunlap, who have been selling vintage pottery and furniture and army memorabilia and a host of other collectibles to bargain hunters from across the nation since Saturday.
“This year I’ve been seeing a lot of people looking for old records,” Sassie Cunningham said. “They don’t call them records; they want to know if I have any ‘vinyl.’ It took me a while to figure out what they were talking about . . . They’re looking for Elvis, Johnny Cash, the Beatles – just about anybody who put out records, somebody out there is interested in buying.”
The rush won’t let up until the end of this coming weekend, when Mrs. Cunningham and her crew will gratefully pack away whatever collectibles are left on the tables filling her parking lot and head home to rest.
Located on the Signal Mountain side of Dunlap, adjacent to the Sequatchie County town’s first traffic light, Sassie’s has been a fixture on the World’s Longest Yard Sale map for the past five years.
Although experts had predicted that the high cost of gasoline would sharply curtail the number of shoppers at the yard sale this year, Mrs. Cunningham said she has seen no such drop. She’s already seen license plates from Florida, Oklahoma, Michigan, Arkansas and Texas, and an assortment of other states she can’t remember.
Collectors look forward to coming to the sale every year, she said, and have not let the poor state of the economy keep them from looking for more bargains this summer.
"Of course it's not really booming yet," she said. "The sale doesn't officially start until Thursday. But we're definitely staying busy."
Created in 1987, the world’s longest yard sale was the brain child of former Jamestown, TN official Mike Walker, who was looking for a way to draw travelers off the interstates and into more rural areas.
Since then, the sale has grown like Topsy. It now stretches 630 miles – from the Ohio-Michigan border all the way into Alabama – and follows the path of U.S. 127.
The sale, which always begins on the first Thursday in August, was originally designed as an opportunity for people who live along U.S. 127 to haul out the bric-a-brac in their homes they no longer wanted and sell it to eager yard sale aficionados.
Today, however, a huge percentage of the sellers are dealers from other areas who rent space along the route during the sale and set out their wares. From these spaces, they hawk everything from vintage toys to old license plates to Depression glassware to flea market staples to rusty farm equipment.
Still, many homeowners also seize the opportunity to stage a yard sale that is virtually guaranteed to draw dozens – perhaps hundreds – of eager shoppers.
For people who want to shop at the U.S. 127 Corridor Sale, hard-core yard-salers have lots of advice:
* Get a good night’s sleep. The most successful shoppers are the ones with lots of endurance.
* Stock up on bottled water and other cold drinks; the sale passes through areas where stores are few and far between and temperatures are likely to soar into the mid-90s. Many shoppers travel with ice-packed coolers filled with their favorite soft drinks and bottled water, so they will not wind up dehydrated.
* Wear cool, comfortable clothing and shoes.
* Bring small bills – lots of $1 and $5 and $10 bills. That way, when you talk a dealer down to half of his original $5 price, you won’t have to hand him a $20 bill to pay for the item.
* If the items you collect are fragile, bring along bubble wrap or newspapers or other wrapping material, so you can make sure your new treasures get home safely.
* Be patient. There will be lots of traffic and drivers who don’t know their way around, and blowing your horn at them won’t help.
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