The Yard Sale That Just Keeps On Going

For 450 miles along a narrow strip of highway, observe the extended family of the yard sale enthusiast: the sly, syrupy antiques dealer; the poker-faced local, seller of screen doors and arrowheads; the hipster in tinted sunglasses; the middle-aged woman, feverish, with husband and tote bag.

When a county executive in Jamestown, Tenn., announced his idea for attracting visitors to this isolated country, it was an act of faith. But 18 years later, the Route 127 Sale is a jam-packed, slow-moving caravan of people extending from Kentucky, through Tennessee, and into Georgia and Alabama.

The sale has become so spectacularly successful that Harry Rinker, one of the country’s foremost collectibles experts, did not bother to attend this year: What was once a treasure hunt known only to insiders, he said, is now an institution. Two years ago, when he filmed a documentary on the event, he met three couples on their honeymoon.

“To me, 127 is just a big gathering of the clan,” said Rinker, who spoke by telephone from Scotland, where he was touring a whiskey distillery on the Isle of Skye.

Route 127 runs through the Cumberland Plateau, coal-mining country dogged by poverty and isolation; in Fentress County, where the idea for the sale originated, more than half the residents are on Medicaid, the highest percentage in the state.

For these four days, though, the road is such a blur of commerce that motorists routinely get into fender-benders because their attention wanders. The two-lane highway is lined with card tables, antique sellers’ tents, bubble-wrap concessions and a seemingly endless series of hand-lettered signs advertising such things as “meat skins,” “jewelry/fried pies” and “baby stuff.”

It would be a mistake to assume the sellers were rustics. In the upscale community of Walden, just north of Chattanooga, a slim, green-eyed dealer named Michael Rudy stands by a booth stocked with antique glass and collectibles, an amiable look on his face. But he is watching. After 28 years in the business, he can tell what kind of customer you are based on the first three things you pick up.

Rudy, who lives in Atlanta, has developed a repertoire of trading strategies and does not hesitate to use them. He knows when you are pretending you don’t know what Bakelite is, he marks objects up so he can later magnanimously mark them down, and he doesn’t like being asked for free advice.

“You want me to give away my learning and earning? Buy me a Coke,” said Rudy, 55. “I want something in return that meets my needs.”

Some five miles north, where ceramic rooster lamps give way to Harley-Davidson throw rugs, the vendors are locals -- more along the lines of Earl Grimes, who sells antiques only on this one day a year.

Grimes, 48, installs marble for a living; he is deeply sunburned, wears a muscle shirt and has straight gray hair that falls to his shoulders. But he’s gotten wise -- no longer would he sell an antique glass bottle for $15 when a collector would buy it for $800.

Nowadays, he said, he wouldn’t let a neighbor know if he or she were under-pricing an antique -- not even if it were his mother-in-law.

“Lord, no,” Grimes said, his disgust barely concealed. “Still no, even if it would be the preacher.”

That’s the biggest change since 1987, said Joe Rosson, a Knoxville appraiser who hosts “Treasures in Your Attic,” a PBS show about antiques and collectibles.

As professional expertise has arrived on Route 127, the discoveries have become rare. Put it this way: These days, Rosson said, “I certainly wouldn’t be looking for an American circa 1760 Chippendale highboy.

“I don’t want to say there was naivete at one time, but you know, when it started, Mom and Pop were not antique dealers,” he said. “Now it’s like ‘Pa, here come the suckers.’ ”

Credit for the sale goes to Mike Walker, who in 1987 was county executive in Fentress County. Travelers were bypassing the area because they stayed on the interstate highways, Routes 75 and 40, and Walker thought of an open-air crafts fair to attract visitors. Now, businesses and homeowners rent their land to hundreds of vendors who travel from out of town.

It remains wholly decentralized -- vendors do not register anywhere, nor do visitors. Stephanie Huling, of the Fentress County Chamber of Commerce, said it was impossible to quantify how much the county benefited from the sale. But by Friday, she said, local hotels were so booked that many visitors had to drive two or three hours for a room.

As word has spread about the yard sale’s success, various rural communities have tried to follow suit -- in 2003, promoters announced a similar annual event along Highway 70, which extends east from Memphis, and last year an Ohio community did the same. Huling said she routinely fielded calls asking for advice about launching a similar effort, and she never knew what to tell them.

“It’s just really so hard to say, ‘This is what you do,’ ” she said.

To visitors, the sale no longer seems to be the work of a local chamber of commerce, but of the people who live along the road.

In a field near Whitwell, an 82-year-old woman named Alva Nell Henry sits by a box filled with chunks of handmade soap, which she is selling for $1.50 apiece.

Henry, the daughter of a coal miner, has lost her teeth, and her swimming-pool blue eyes are set in a deeply lined face. In the stifling heat of August, she wears a long, checked dress and old-fashioned laced boots.

Henry is giving out swatches of fabric torn from a white sheet and lettered with Bible verses -- “prayer cloths,” she calls them, and says they have cured tumors in people who wore them.

On a sheet of paper, she has written an explanation: “God does not work magic. He works mericals.”