4 Days, 690 Miles, Countless Stalls: Behold the ‘World’s Longest Yard Sale’

To the visitor driving in from out of state, the 127 Yard Sale seems like a kind of Ironman for thrifters. The “world’s longest yard sale” is a test of endurance and attention. Spanning six states, 690 miles and thousands of stalls, it traverses dramatic landscapes, delicate cultural terrain and two time zones. Seeing it all in the four allotted days — Aug. 3 to 6 this year — is enough to induce vertigo in even the most stable-minded deal hunter. But some of us are foolish enough to try anyway.

The event was designed to promote cultural and economic exchange. In 1987, Mike Walker, then a 28-year-old county executive in Jamestown, Tenn., conceived of it as a way to lure travelers off the Interstate and into the small towns along U.S. Route 127, from Jamestown to Covington, Ky. In the following decades, it spread south to Georgia and Alabama and inched north to Ohio and then Michigan.

The 127 Yard Sale is fluid, kinetic, alive. This makes it a bit hard to find its official beginning. Driving down 127, I started to see “yard sale” signs long before reaching its northernmost point in Addison, Mich. We asked some guys at a gas station where they thought it started. They pointed to a nearby Baptist church, and soon we were standing in an orderly marketplace on a plot of pine and grass. Here I saw the first arrays of glassware, the first piles of free naked dolls, the dubbed VHS tapes, the loose silverware, the lines of floating dresses.

This couldn’t be a contiguous sale — or could it? The Facebook group I’d joined suggested that Michigan was the sparsest section. But even here, we could hardly drive a quarter mile without spying a Sharpied invitation to a “Barn Sale” a mile away, or “Thousands of Items, CHEAP, 4th House on Your Left.” A subtle terror began to take hold — a respect for the enormous scale of the thing.

“You’re never going to make it,” a gentleman in a chicken-patterned Havana shirt informed me, with his wife by his side, nodding. “You’re not even in Ohio yet and look how much time you spent talking to us.” I was ashamed to tell them that this was only our second stop. Tracy Tupman and Megan Mateer turned out to be co-owners of a prop rental company in Ohio — and veterans of the yard sale. They pull up here every year in an empty truck and trailer that they expect to fill up well before the last day. Intentional thrifters, they came prepared with a list of objects they hope to secure for future…