S.C.’s Largest Garage Sale packs in crowds, sells pieces of nostalgia

South Carolina’s Largest Garage Sale attendees Robb and Christy Trusty happily left the event Saturday morning with full arms and two vendors in tow who were wheeling out the large fish tank they had just purchased as the group made their way through the bustling crowd.

“It was a success,” said Robb Trusty. “Another good time,” he said while holding a South Carolina Gamecocks trashcan filled with odds and ends that included pepper spray he bought as a safety measure for his daughter in college.

The Myrtle Beach-area couple has been attending the sale for years and said they’ve seen it get busier and busier. With many shopping options offered online these days, it’s not the same as hunting for unique items in person, they said.

“I have to see it [and] feel it,” said Christy Trusty.

Brother and sister vendors Emily and Matthew Hashuy helped the couple out to their car with a 36-gallon fish tank along with other purchases from their stall.

“It has everything I need to run it. … I’m so excited. I got a great deal,” Christy Trusty said about her new fish tank.

The large fish tank was just one an example of the array of items offered at South Carolina’s Largest Garage Sale event, which ran from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and featured more than 200 vendors.

The sale was a treasure trove filled with an amusing mixture of both the odd and the ordinary. From lanterns to sunscreen, merchants sold a blend of items, including the homespun and handmade along with collectables, chunks of history, houseware and hardware at the 28th annual event held at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center.

Admission was free to the event with a $5 parking fee.

Vendors packed out the 100,000-square foot space inside and also hugged the building outside with tables offering Barbie dolls, beaded key chains, artwork, clocks and more.

Lamps of all shapes and sizes and from every decade seemed to be hot commodities at the event. Attendees strolled around booths with them tucked under their arms or wheeling them in caddies as throngs of patrons shopped while carting a mixture of items. One man toted both a dollhouse and a Samurai sword.

Patrons said they were delightfully overwhelmed by the amount of bargains to choose from and the size of the crowd.

“The whole thing has been such great fun,” said Kathy Centola, a Myrtle Beach resident and event attendee, who said it was her first time at the sale.

Centola had a stuffed bear smartly dressed in a green velvet Victoria-style gown and gushed about her find.

“She was only $5. I’m a bear collector, and I couldn’t leave her. She had to come home,” she said.

A wide range of collectibles were showcased at the event along with historical items and antiques.

“We’ve got a lot of primitive hand tools,” said vendor and Socastee resident Les Rendelman, who was operating three tables that included antique tools, glassware and jewelry.

“I sold a German World War II-era clock today. People are buying it like crazy like they usually do,” said Rendelman, who is retired from the antique business but participates in sale events annually and was a second timer at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center sale.

Rendelman said he was also a Vietnam War veteran who was a combat medic with the Marines, and he offered pieces of military history at his tables, such as a chunk of metal stamped with the letters U.S.M.R., which he said stood for United States Mounted Rifles – a military unit that fought in the Mexican-American War during the mid-1800s but was disbanded after the Civil War, he said.

The small, circular, one-pound item wasn’t priced, but Rendelman said the right buyer would know it, and he would entertain an offer on it. His collection also boasted a Chinese porcelain teapot he said was 200 to 250 years old. It was wearing a $65 price tag.

Paul Edwards, Myrtle Beach Convention Center General Manager, also had unique items for sale at the event, including a rare antique scale he said was more than a hundred years old and used to weigh cotton plucked in the field, after which pickers would be paid based on how many pounds they brought in, he said of the item he priced for $90.

In an age where secondhand and collectibles are all offered online, Edwards said actually seeing the variety of items laid out and the personal interactions between customers and vendors keeps the crowds coming.

“It’s just the excitement of seeing it all in one place. … Here it’s tens of thousands of items in one place, and I also think people like to bargain with each other on site,” he said.

Vendors from the Myrtle Beach area paid the $50 fee for a space along with others from surrounding states and some as far away as New York and Ohio, Edwards said.

“Vendors come a long way to sell their products because of the number of people that are buying,” he said.

For both vendors and patrons, the sale is like a big annual reunion as many of the same folks return year after year, Edwards said.

Anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 shoppers would pass through the large one-day sale and about $300,000 would likely change hands among the crowd, he said.

Edwards has been involved with the sale since its beginning. The first 20 years were spent in the Pavilion Parking Garage and the past eight have been at the convention center.

He said one of the most unique items he saw for sale was a stuffed otter he purchased for his cabin the very first year of the event. Another one-of-a-kind treasure he found was a fireplace surround that a vendor’s mother brought to the country from Germany.

“It’s just a great collection of things,” he said.

This story was originally published August 20, 2016 at 4:28 PM with the headline "S.C.’s Largest Garage Sale packs in crowds, sells pieces of nostalgia."