JEFFERSON COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS

Who doesn’t enjoy a trip to the fairgrounds? Tasty food, different farm animal competitions, and sometimes, relatively-safe rides. Always a good time.

With this in mind, I headed out to the Jefferson county early that day. I was aiming to get there with enough time to both check out the items and have some down time. Before an auction, I like setting aside time for pacing around and doing some neurotic hand-wringing before second guessing my purchases. Admittedly, I got a good amount of mental hand-wringing accomplished on the drive down. With the prevalence of Google Maps in all navigation, Google decides how you get from point A to point B - and it took me down some super backwoods-y roads.

The fairgrounds were nice and humming by 8:15am with country kids sheering sheep and riding horses. It was nice, it smelled like a John Cougar Mellencamp song. All across the fairgrounds, there were people in droves. I wasn’t too particularly surprised. My best guess was that this was the most happening activity in Jefferson County that day.

It was nice, it smelled like a John Cougar Mellencamp song.

There were a ton of people milling around the barn where the auction was being held - not a good sign.  The items in this estate auction were top quality, but they were top quality items from older and less popular styles (read: not likely to grab the attention of the coveted hipster base).  I lasted about an hour and a half at the auction once the bids started coming in.

I specifically went out to bid on some arts and crafts-era pottery and other miscellaneous “curio shelf” type items.  The blessing and the curse of the internet is that now everyone is an unlicensed and uninformed  appraiser and - accordingly - may have some misguided notices about the value of items. The crowd at this auction was an auctioneer’s dream, completely eschewing Google-search suggestions on value and running prices to astronomical levels.  Once I saw a good couple of  items that I was bidding on hit double or triple my max price, I knew that I was out.

 

 

After getting skunked at the auction and not even getting the chance to be forced to eat a hotdog, I stopped and had an awesome breakfast biscuit sandwich at the Pressed Flour bakery in Shepherdstown.

if you don’t mind paying retail or close to retail, you may as well stick around. Things might get cheaper throughout the day when folks have to take out a second mortgage to continue bidding.  I didn’t have the time (or desire) to wait, so I cut my losses and split.