Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois join forces for National Road yard sale days from Baltimore, Md., to St. Louis, Mo., through June 1.
The sales will go for 825 miles along the National Road, or U.S. 40, from dawn to dusk each day.
Antiques, glassware, furniture, fresh garden produce plus other collectibles will be available. Individuals also will have the opportunity to traverse a historic byway, feel the pulse of individual communities, sample regional food and simply enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
The National Road, the first federally financed interstate, helped open the land west of the Appalachians to settlers and commerce. It celebrated its bicentennial last year. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned it on March 29, 1806, although it took decades to finish.
A difficult but passable route through dense woods and across rivers and prairies, it sparked trade with the vast expanse of the nation’s midsection, then called the Northwest Territory, said Bill Withuhn, curator of transportation history at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
“If you’re going to have people go out there and settle the wilderness, you need a commercial artery to connect the settled area with the new frontier. That’s what the road was all about,” he said.
Today, weathered stone mile-markers still dot the old National Road, which ran from Cumberland, Md., through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana to Vandalia, Ill.
It was later lengthened, paved and renamed U.S. 40, but was eclipsed in the 1960s by Interstate 70, a parallel superhighway. Stung by the closure of motels and diners along what for many was their Main Street, dozens of towns turned to festivals and events as the yard sale – now in its third year – for extra cash.
In Dublin, about 40 miles east of Indianapolis, cars lined the road’s grassy edges this week as shoppers scanned tables loaded with children’s clothing, Depression-era glassware, toys and boxes filled with hodgepodge of old tools, postcards and brass doorknobs.
For for information, contact coordinator Patricia McDaniel at (765) 478-4809 or (765) 825-6295, email info@oldstorefrontantiques.com or visit www.oldstorefrontantiques.com.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
