Main St. America revisited with annual yard sale
For twenty years, Tim Dice, a pastor at the former Liberty Baptist Church in Dunreith, Ind., has been part of the Historic National Road Yard Sale. He started out by himself with a yard sale under a tree along the U.S. 40 roadway. The church has since closed, and Dice sold part of the property, but he still lives there. This year, close to 60 booths sold their wares in this small part of the six-state annual sale that highlights the first federally-funded road in the United States, built between 1811 and 1834.
In its heyday, U.S. 40, which has been called “The Road that Built the Nation,” and “The Main Street of America,” was a beacon of travel for Americans bringing Indiana to its status as the Crossroads of America. As motor transportation progressed, the road became surpassed by expressway and small towns lost business and traffic. But the nostalgic small town appeal is still there.
In 2003, the Indiana National Road Association, for which Donna Tauber was the president, started the national yard sale to promote tourism on the national road. The event, Tauber says, started the first year with sales along Richmond to Indianapolis, working with the goal to promote towns, community, businesses and the people along U.S. 40. After the first year, other communities wanted to join, and in the 20 years of the annual event, the sale has grown. With COVID-19, as in the rest of the world, the sale diminished, but Tauber says it is now back to what it was and is still growing.
People travel along the historic U.S. Main Street throughout Indiana, and peers in other states from Illinois to Maryland, during the annual event which is the first Wednesday through Sunday after Memorial Day weekend. Along the 824-mile long yard sale, drivers pull off the road when a sale is spotted. Some sales are single family operations and others are multi-family or organization offers.
As with most people running yard sales along U.S. 40, Dice enjoys the social aspect of the sale just as much as selling. Last year, Mike Pence’s brother, U.S. Rep. Greg Pence, showed up at Dice’s booth. Dice enjoyed the fact that you hear about someone in the news, and all of a sudden they are standing in front of you. “I looked over and said, ‘Is that who I think it is?’ And he said, ‘Yeah it is,’ ” Dice said.
“It’s not really about the money,” says Angie Coulter, in the outskirts of Indianapolis, in Plainfield. She and her neighbor, Treva Bergman, started having sales with the annual event and joined forces selling together in the U.S. 40 sale since 2017. Now, their “Tent City,” as they refer to their yard sale, has grown from 7 tents in 2017 to over 1300 square feet of tent space this year. “I make just get enough to kind of feed my little summer ventures where I go to concerts,” Coulter said.
Every year, they stand out because everything is new to their sale. They only bring back a few bins of items from the year before, having taken everything else to Goodwill after their previous sales. “We just want it out,” says Bergman about the items for sale every year. Then they start collecting again for the next sales.
Friends Bev Richardson (Greencastle) and Laura Rees (Ladoga) started their shopping and exploring in Greencastle on Wednesday and planned to head east across Indiana. When asked how far they were going to go, they responded that it depended on how much they were enjoying themselves, how many sales they would find. But laughter and enjoyment of their discoveries joined the good friends.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Six states see 20th annual Historic National Road Yard Sale
