SEVILLE: Eighty-seven-year-old Harold Gannon sat in a lawn chair Saturday as he welcomed people to a yard sale in front of his daughter’s Main Street house.
“Where did all of your stuff come from?” a stranger asked, browsing through some Christmas decorations laid out on a table.
“The White House,” Gannon said.
Surprised, the stranger looked up at Gannon, then cocked his head to the side as if trying to see whether the old man in the sunglasses was telling the truth.
“The white house,” Gannon told the stranger a second time, this time lifting his arm and pointing his index finger. “The white house there across the street.”
Everyone laughed.
Seville, a town of about 2,200 in southern Medina County, is known for two big things: Mr. and Mrs. Captain Martin Van Buren Bates — he was 7-foot-8 and weighed 470 pounds and she was 7-foot-11 and weighed 413 — who came to be known as the Seville giants after they settled here in 1873; and the annual Seville yard sale, often billed as the largest in the world even though townspeople say they’re fairly certain that it’s not.
On Saturday, a few visited the Bates, who are buried on the end of town in Mound Hill Cemetery. But thousands — families with baby strollers, people walking dogs, groups of Amish from nearby farmland — plodded up and down the streets of Seville looking for treasures.
Monkeys and baskets and Native American statues filled much of the corner of one yard.
“It was plumb full yesterday,” Brenda Stilgenbauer said, looking across what remained of her sale. “I’d say it’s about half gone.”
There was still a knee-high pile of stuffed monkeys ($2 each), more than a dozen baskets ($1-$3 each) and three Native American figures, each 3 to 4 feet tall and dressed in feathers and leather ($40 for the tallest, $100 for the smaller pair).
“I collected all of this and I’m done,” Stilgenbauer said. “I’m not collecting any more.”
A few doors down, a woman handed a white sweater with a Gap label to Gina Hatten and paid her $1.50, the price marked. The woman didn’t even try to haggle.
“I try to price things by thinking what I’d be willing to pay for them,” Hatten said, sharing some of what she’s learned selling things at the annual Seville sale for about 40 years.
No bins, she said. People don’t like to paw through bins looking for things.
On Saturday, her family set up a portable carport in the driveway that shielded shoppers from the summer sun and served as a giant rack to hang neatly laundered jeans, shirts and other items.
And, she said, be flexible.
“We’re bundlers,” Hatten’s daughter, Amy Sauerbrei said. “We negotiate with people who buy several things.”
Four groups of their family put things into Seville’s sale this year at Hatten’s parents’ house. A neatly written ledger showed they cleared $756.20 on Friday. They expected to make about half that Saturday, the second and final day of this year’s sale.
“It’s amazing, really, when you think that most of what we’re selling costs $1 or two,” Sauerbrei said.
Down the street, Ernie Joy and Ericha Fryfogle-Joy — who are opening Wadsworth Brewing Company at the end of summer — were browsing empty-handed.
Ernie, who has a tattoo of Star Wars robot R2-D2 on his forearm, was lingering near a table of Star Wars figurines. And Ericha was prowling, trying to match her best-ever Seville garage sale find from about 11 years ago — a 1970s, two-tier, Tiger wood table for $2.
But the couple said, they had already scored at Saturday’s sale for their business.
Two 4-foot, blow-molded Christmas characters that light up — a Santa and a Frosty the Snowman — were already locked up in their car.
Price? $5 each.
Santa and Frosty, by way of Seville, will be glowing inside Wadsworth Brewing come December.
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.