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Hunting and haggling, selling and
Lugging two old wooden ironing boards,
Cheryl Bell trudges toward her truck at First Monday Trade Days in Canton, Texas.
Her face is flushed and the boards keep slipping, but she’s smiling.
“Five dollars for both of them,” says Bell, 48, of Mesquite, Texas.
Bell is among 300,000 bargain hunters who descend upon
America’s oldest and largest flea market each month to rummage
through more than 200 acres of every kind of antique and collect
ible imaginable, from horse collars and china hutches to waffle irons
and old wagons.
First Monday Trade Days sprang up in the 1850 s when the
circuit judge visited Canton (pop. 3,292) on the first
Monday of each month to conduct legal business.
Farmers and townspeople soon began showing up
Cheryl Bell
on the town square with hunting dogs, guns and other goods
to swap and sell. The shopping extravaganza still is called First
Monday Trade Days, but nowadays it’s actually held Thursday
through Sunday before the first Monday of each month.
From sunup to sundown, treasure hunters armed with
maps of the sprawling market poke through piles of hand-
made quilts, postcards, ’sos prom dresses, old Archie
comic books, retro bowling shirts, ice cream scoops and
enough cowboy boots to outfit more than one rodeo.
Food vendors sustain shoppers with baskets of cat- ,
fish, gumbo, turkey drumsticks and homemade jk
ice cream cranked out by an old John Deere Jp
tractor engine.
“This is a fabulous place,” says Bell,
who has shopped at Trade Days since she
was 16. She plans to use her wooden iron
ing boards fix laundry-room shelves to
display a collection of antique irons and
vintage detergent boxes.
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Rows of leather cowboy boots are among a plethora of second-hand treasures for sale.
Bell, as with most flea-market fanatics, delights in the vast mishmash of merchandise
where fine jewelry and delicately beaded Civil War-era purses mingle alongside SI,S(X)
antique phonographs and S2O guitars.
“I’ve sold six so far this weekend," says Jack Deeds, of Beaumont, Texas, holding
one of the homemade instruments he fashioned from a bedpan and bam wood.
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Down a nearby path, R.L. and Randi Lasater of Tyler, Texas, ponder the purchase
of an antique iron baby bed. Randi, 61, imagines it parked in front of their bay
I A shopper finds a sentimental
I plaque to hang in her home.
window holding visiting grandbabies or her doll collec
tion. She takes out her cell phone and makes a call to see
what it would cost to sandblast the bed’s lead paint. R.L.
takes out his wallet and counts out S2(X).
Some treasure hunters don’t know what they can’t
live without until they find it, while others search for
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