Spanning approximately 690 miles from northern Alabama to southern Michigan, the U.S. Route 127 Yard Sale claims to be the “world’s longest.” It’s hard to argue otherwise. Now in its 37th year, the event held on the first weekend of August is an annual magnet for bargain seekers, antique pickers, road trippers and entrepreneurs of all ages.

There’s no telling what you’ll find: a basket of old prescription eyeglasses, sun-worn yard flamingos, homemade Teletubbies dolls, bootleg Taylor Swift bedroom curtains.

Regardless of where one starts along the route, the hunting grounds present themselves in front yards, parking lots and farm fields.

Sales can be found outside trailer parks, in the driveways of a three-story homes, and everywhere else in between. There is no barrier to entry for those seeking to participate in some secondhand capitalism.

I set out to photograph the entire route, start to finish, over the course of three days.

Alabama

A mustard yellow hand-painted sign about the size of a ping-pong table marks the starting point of the Route 127 Yard Sale in Gadsden. The sign provides a rough map through six states: Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan.

Nearby, at Noccalula Falls Park, pop-up canopies, folding tables and food trucks were set up around the parking lot and picnic shelters.

Among the yard art, clothing and secondhand tools displayed for sale was a lemonade stand run by Gatlin Smith, 7, of nearby Piedmont, Ala. Despite the early hour, Smith was already busy topping off red Solo cups in an effort to raise money for a PlayStation 5.

John Leach, 60, was tending to his homemade drum smoker in his front yard just north of the state park. A couple pork butts had been cooking overnight and were just about ready to be shredded and sold to the day’s hungry sale-goers.

In Fort Payne, about a mile north of Dogtown, a massive collection of vintage porcelain signage was on display. Tucked just inside a grove of pine trees, the signs represent some of the most iconic brands of the 1940s and ’50s -- Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up, Royal Crown Cola and Gulf Oil -- running the gamut from museum-quality to bullet-riddled.

Blacksmith anvils, glass telegraph-line insulators and all manner of vintage hammers, hatchets and tools covered table after table inside the pine grove.

Jeff Mask, 68, of Geraldine, Ala., helped his friends from Bear Trap Antiques sell the aforementioned goods for the 17th year in a row. Repeat customers seek them out year after year.

“There’s people coming from everywhere,” Mask said. “It’s just neat to meet people and talk to them.”

Georgia

Leaving the Yellowhammer State behind, the sale route briefly crosses through the far northwestern corner of Georgia into Lookout Mountain.

A pop-up thunderstorm on Friday caught one vendor by surprise outside the Trading Post Smokehouse BBQ restaurant. A heavy downpour left sellers scrambling to cover their tables with blue tarps and large swaths of semi-opaque plastic sheet.

Not far from the Tennessee border, a group of pickers from Florida pulled over to admire the panoramic view from a hang-gliding launch area atop Lookout Mountain. Ann Johnson of Pensacola, Fla., spoke of the thrill of the hunt and enjoying “seeing what I need that I didn’t know I needed.” Her friend Lynn Wise, also of Pensacola, agreed. “I wish I could know the story behind the pieces,” Wise said.

Tennessee

North of Chattanooga, on Signal Mountain, Sara Beth Pegg of Gallatin, Tenn., was manning a booth with her husband, Zach, and their five kids. A vintage Volkswagen bus served as both the centerpiece of their selling space and a sleeping area for members of the family. Over the years the couple managed to pay off their house’s mortgage with extra money they made from the sale.

“It’s kind of a family tradition,” Pegg remarked as her children played nearby with other children of other vendors. Pegg’s great aunt and uncle were vendors beginning the first year of the sale in 1987, when it started in Tennessee.

Outside of Pikeville, vendor Leo Krauss, 75, of Dull, Tenn., reflected on his 20 years selling along Route 127.

“I make more money here than anywhere else,” Krauss said. “They’re laid-back here. Plus, I have a tree,” he said, relaxing in the shade after a long day of selling beads, jewelry and other goods. “If it ain’t here, it ain’t anywhere.”

Thirty miles up the road in Crossville, vendor Alexis Woodbury, 31, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., displayed a collection of Black Americana and Nazi war trophies brought home by G.I.s at the end of World War II.

“I like to take the opportunity to teach people,” she said. A table full of swastika armbands, Jim Crow-era segregation signage and ceramic caricatures of Black Americans stood at the front of her booth. “If we forget our history, we might repeat it,” she said.

In Clarkrange, a tent city of vendors had popped up for the weekend surrounding the Cumberland Mountain General Store. John Hughes, 69, of Fayetteville, Texas, stood amid a sea of vintage metal and porcelain signs with a bushy silver beard and a cowboy hat as he reflected on his long history selling secondhand antiquities.

“When the Beatles came to New York in 1964, I was selling,” said Hughes.

In addition to being the last major stop of the sale in Tennessee, rural Pall Mall is also the boyhood home of World War I hero and Medal of Honor recipient Alvin C. York. His gravesite is only a short drive from the hustle and bustle of the sale.

Approaching the border with Kentucky, Forbus General Store stands along Route 127 as the preferred lunch stop in northern Tennessee. The two-story outpost looks like it belongs on the set of the Andy Griffith Show. Inside the store sale-goers played checkers and waited in line for ice cream.

Kentucky

Near Liberty, a group of local Mennonite families set up booths to sell homegrown vegetables, hand-woven baskets and patchwork quilts to travelers. A group of young ladies wearing long dresses and bonnets were crafting homemade fried hand pies and soft pretzels. Perhaps the most sought-after treat for sale at the stop was fresh ice cream out of a machine powered by a brown horse on treadmill.

The small central Kentucky town of Harrodsburg normally boasts one of the largest collections of vendor booths on the route. Long lines of tents tend to populate a farmer’s field well-known to local treasure seekers, who make the one-hour drive from nearby Louisville or Lexington.

This year, however, many had packed up early and departed following a bout of severe weather that collapsed tents and turned much of the grassy field to mud. Despite the elements, shoppers still turned out to patronize sellers who chose to stand their ground against Mother Nature.

Local sheriff’s deputies were patrolling Route 127 writing tickets to motorists who chose to ignore posted signage that forbade anyone from parking on the shoulder of the highway that weekend.

On the final day of the sale, the rising sun peeked through the low-hanging fog around the Gallatin County fairgrounds in Glencoe. Brian and Wanda Hensley of Shelbyville, Ind., married for 41 years, worked in tandem to arrange antique toys and tools on the dew-covered grass of the fairgrounds.

Up the road in Covington, a handful of booths lined George Steinford Park within eyesight of the downtown Cincinnati skyline.

A Cincinnati-based seller, “Shorti,” who’s been setting up along Route 127 for 20 years, said her motivations were twofold. First, she enjoyed sharing about her faith in God. She also liked making money from her sales.

“It does put a little change in your pocket,” she said.

Ohio

Residential sellers were out in force in Hamilton, a bedroom community northwest of Cincinnati. Front yards were full of deeply discounted deals because sellers wanted to avoid the chore of hauling their wares back up driveways and into garages.

Doug Rehbaum of Fairfield, Ohio, was set up with a handful of other vendors in the parking lot of a Family Dollar. It’s his 10th year selling vintage oil and gasoline ephemera.

“I’ve got a lot of repeat customers from Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan,” Rehbaum said. “I’m in the same spot every year, and they all know it.”

Leaving Hamilton behind, Route 127 passes by the shuttered Champion Paper mill. The journey ahead will take motorists away from the rust belt and into farmlands dominated by hundreds of square miles of corn and soybean fields.

Somewhere North of Hamilton a change in regional nomenclature becomes apparent. The homemade “yard sale” signs are abruptly replaced by signs reading “garage sale.” There were still plenty of used vacuum cleaners, roller skates and jigsaw puzzles to go around.

As the day wore on, vendors began to tear down and pack up. Items that spent the weekend on the $1 dollar table soon found their prices slashed to “free.”

Michigan

Three days and nearly 700 miles later, the sale’s northern terminus comes into view in Addison. Home to a cafe, a public library and a couple of marijuana dispensaries, the sleepy village gets an economic boost from the waves of pickers and yard-salers.

At the final stop of the sale, vendor Sarah Manders of Clayton, Mich., reflected upon the close of her third year selling on Route 127.

“There’s definitely a joy in meeting people who find the same things cool as you,” she said as she sat in a vintage lawn chair, soaking up the late afternoon sun.