127 Sale
012 The 127 Sale is the stuff of legend. A yard sale that stretches seven hundred miles through the middle of the United States for 4 days every August? Just the thought makes my pulse quicken. Every year it is on my calendar, and every year something else is occupying my time in August. Not 2010. I cleared my calendar. With Sit and Read in full swing, I was not going to let another year slip by.
After a hurried overnight fifteen-hour drive west on I-70, we arrived in Eaton, Ohio, on Friday morning. Highway 127 intersects with the interstate about 60 miles north of Cincinnati, a stone’s throw from the Indiana border. We steered the truck south toward Alabama and began getting acquainted with the road that would be our home for the next several days.
Photographer & Writer
—Kyle Garner
Sit and Read Furniture
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We came across our first yard sale no more than a mile from the junction. I found some interesting books for a quarter each, but otherwise it was nothing to write home about, an average suburban yard sale at best. That set the tone for our northern third of the 127 Corridor Sale: a few rough gems among piles and piles of discarded mid-nineties Wal-Mart clothes and stacks of used dishes.
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Every town we'd drive through had at least a dozen sales to choose from. It was impossible to stop at even half of them, so we relied on drive-by shopping and gut feeling. It wasn't until the next afternoon, when we got to the southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee, that our luck started to pick up.
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Local junk and antique dealers with massive collections of rusty tools and cast iron were mixed in with even more front-yard piles of discarded clothing and fried-pie stands. The renegade-flea-market style made our drive-by shopping more effective.
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It was easy to see where the “old things” were. I still hadn't purchased a single piece a furniture, but I found several early-century quilts and expanded my collection of vernacular ceramics by tenfold. I was hitting my stride.
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Next year, I thought, I would definitely start in Alabama, head north, and skip Ohio all together. With only four days and hundreds of miles to shop, Ohio was a waste of time. As the sun set the next evening, we finished our time on Highway 127, just north of Chattanooga. The going was just getting really good, and though my gut was telling me that more treasures lay farther down the road, everyone was getting packed up for the year.
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Retired carousel horses.
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"MANY OLD ITEMS" exactly what you want to see when drive-by shopping.
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The perfect trailer.
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Nia, my travel companion meets a deer.
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Pigeon Forge Pottery, Tennessee.
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Rusty wagon wheels.
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Old raps.
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Another handsome gentleman...
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Nia and I purchase a quilt and a hand carved driftwood bird.
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Photo: Dina Pugh
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1920's tin toy airplane.
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