The Alexander City Outlook

30 years of flea markets have been good to Santuck

J.B. Shockley has been selling honey at the Santuck Flea Market since it had just a scattering of vendors, and since Santuck was barely a bump in the road.

“I’ve been coming since 1976,” Shockley, an Alexander City resident, said. “I think I’ve missed about three times. I don’t make a lot of money, really, I just come because I enjoy it.”

The flea market, which practically put the Elmore County community of Santuck on the map, celebrated the opening of its 30th year Saturday. As usual, it backed up traffic along Alabama Highway 9 for miles, drawing more than 3,000 people to a humble pasture to amble though and haggle over the varied merchandise and crafts of almost 400 vendors.

Shockley, one of Santuck’s few lifetime vendors, said Saturday wasn’t a great day for business – muggy and overcast, the crowds weren’t as big as usual – but that’s not why he keeps selling his hand-raised honey from the back of an old Ford pickup.

“I like to come because I see a lot of people I don’t see elsewhere; people I haven’t seen in 40 years, but live a few miles away,” he said.

Santuck is a goldmine for bargain hunters and antique collectors, but the effects of the monthly convergence of craft-collectors and bargain hunters are truly striking.

“Well, we built this building with money from the flea market,” Eunice Johnson – who “works 24/7″ making sure things are set for each first-Saturday extravaganza – said from her office in the Santuck Community Center.

“Then there’s the fire station, the new fire station out on (Alabama Highway) 170, six fire trucks …”

“And the two trucks over at the new station,” her husband, Jack, interjected.

With 400 booth spaces packed into a six-acre pasture next to Santuck Baptist Church, “we also take care of the needs of the community,” Eunice said, with outreaches to ill, elderly or down-on-their-luck residents.

She said there were just 45 booths at the first flea market 30 years ago; nobody took a head-count. The variety of merchandise, though, has probably multiplied as much as attendance.

Marsha Phillips sold “windcatchers.” Twisting mystically in the wind as sunlight played on iridescent paint, they are sheets of 18-gauge steel, cut into dozens of thin ribs, twisted to create a swirling, colorful mirage

Max Nichols’ table was covered in knives: medieval daggers, compact hunting knives and Japanese butterfly knives “with one free lesson included.”

Many booths sold flowers and other plants, but few attracted as many curious gazes as Vance Treuil’s collection of tropical oddities.

“I don’t believe that; is it real?,” Dixie Mitchell asked him,

looking closely at a vermilliad, a plant uncannily growing from a dead limb, no dirt to be found. “Is it alive?”

Treuil said his plants were like the Santuck experience itself.

“It’s always interesting; you see a wide variety of people, and you can always find someone selling something unique, something bizarre,” he said.

The Santuck Flea Market is held on the first Saturday of every month except January and February. Most vendors, Johnson said, open up just as soon as there’s enough light to see.

The Santuck community is on Alabama Highway 9, about six miles from Wetumpka.