Connections: Treasure Hunting

The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household. 

Heaven knows the South Fork is a great place to get up early on a Saturday and go scouting for things you want, need, or are just crazy about. But our family, you could say, specializes in old things — I suspect some of the Rattray clan started yard sale-ing and thrifting even before the terms came into common usage — and our house is stuffed to the gills already. I myself gave up going to such sales a long time ago. Instead of dreaming of the next great find, I’ve dreamed of the great unload.

At Village Hall, the application you fill out reads “Garage Sale.” We don’t seem to have any of those these days; I don’t remember seeing a classified advertisement for one in The Star for years, and we are the prime source for such ads. In point of fact, the sale isn’t going to be in our yard, exactly. Instead, it will be in front of the 18th century barn on the lot adjoining our house. And that brings me to the real reason we are finally having our yard sale.

If all goes as planned, the East Hampton Historical Society will be taking the barn apart this spring, moving it to the Mulford Farm, across Main Street, and restoring whatever needs restoring. Robert Hefner, the village preservation consultant, told me it was the last untouched old barn in the village.

Word got out about the barn a couple of years ago, and the historical society has found a heritage-minded donor who will make it all possible.

We will be very sad to see the old barn gone, but — after years of wondering if we should convert it to a house, and many discussions of how we might shore it up, if we didn’t — the time has come for it (and us) to move on. It’s wonderful to know the barn will be seen and appreciated by the public for years to come.

I rather hoped the historical society would call it the Edwards barn, but history is history: Experts in local lore call it the Hedges barn because when it was built it was an outbuilding to the Hedges house, which once stood where the East Hampton Library’s north wing is now. (In our family, the Hedges house was known as “the purple house,” and Jeannette Edwards Rattray was born there. It now forms part of the East Hampton Town Hall complex.) 

At any rate, instead of a yard sale I suppose we could legitimately say we are having a barn sale, which somehow sounds a bit more alluring. Some of what will be offered are objects that family members, and friends of cousins, and friends of cousins’ friends have stored there and forgotten about. (Does anyone windsurf anymore? Croquet, anyone?)

Judging by the many ads in The Star, yard sales, tag sales, moving sales, and estate sales are practically an economy in and of themselves out here, with so many being held on autumn weekends. Perhaps calling ours a barn sale will make it stand out as a tad more unique.

The bad news is that it is approaching much too quickly for comfort, on the weekend of Oct. 18. We have a lot of sorting, hauling, and lifting — and, no doubt, bickering — to accomplish before we open the cash box. We will, of course, advertise in The Star and welcome all comers. No early birds, please!