Swap meet, citywide garage sales this weekend

GREENFIELD — Hundreds, if not thousands, of people will swarm to Greenfield this Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the Early Wheels of Iowa Swap Meet, held at the Adair County Fairgrounds.

Car enthusiasts and more enjoy the event for all the treasures they find, and the friendships they make there.

“There is a little bit of something for everybody. There’s swap meet type stuff, there’s flea market type stuff, there’s car parts out there,” said Andrea Woodruff of Cumberland, a representative of Early Wheels of Iowa. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

This is the 59th annual swap meet Early Wheels has done. There is great debate about what year the event moved from Atlantic to Greenfield, however many say it was in the late 1980s.

About 40 volunteers have spent the last several days preparing for the event here by setting up various things necessary to hold such a large event. They paint lines on the grass to designate areas for each vendor and plan for parking vehicles in a field on or near the fairgrounds.

The problem Early Wheels is facing is that many of the volunteers with its organization are aging. That has forced Early Wheels to make the tough decision that 2021 will be the last year they will oversee the Greenfield swap meet. A local group here is already working toward making sure a swap meet stays here.

“It’s just time. It’s a lot of work and it’s time for somebody else to take it over,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff said that in all of the time she’s been helping coordinate the yearly swap meet here, she’s observed how good Greenfield is to the swap meet and how good the swap meet is for Greenfield. City-wide garage sales will also be taking place in Greenfield and the surrounding area this weekend.

“All of the money we make at the swap meet we donate because we’re a non-profit. We donate to places in Greenfield. We try to give back as much as we can,” Woodruff said. “We also try and buy most of our food from places in Greenfield. We try to give back as much as we can.”