A 40-year tradition of great bargains will come to an end after this year’s Barn Sale on Sept. 17-18 at the Kane County Fairgrounds.

Chairperson Lisa O’Leary Volk says the sale will look the same this year with the exception of mostly behind-the-scene efforts made to sell the infrastructure.

“We own (and are selling) semitrailers and a moving truck,” she says, “and tools and things. But for the shopper, it will be nothing different than the way we normally operate.”

She calls the event “a pretty monumental sale” that typically features 15 semitrailers full of merchandise donated over a period of several months. It is all organized, stored, priced, displayed and sold by scores of parish volunteers.

“Everything is put on huge, wooden pallet boxes,” O’Leary Volk explains, “and unloaded with forklifts at the fairgrounds.”

This year, seven trailers of nothing but furniture are set to be unloaded in three to four hours by the Geneva football team.

“We start moving in (to the fairgrounds) on Sept. 7,” she says, “and work all the way through until (Sept.) 17th. We kind of feel we set up an entire Target store in eight, nine days’ time, minus the food.”

The sale ends at 2 p.m. Sunday and “hopefully by 4 p.m., we’ll be down to bare floors,” she says. “We don’t ever keep any merchandize from year to year.”

The sale gives much of what is left over to other charities and recycles whenever possible.

The first 20

The annual Barn Sale began 40 years ago as a fundraiser for St. John Neumann Parish in St. Charles. The sale was held on parish grounds, raising money to help pay for the first church building. St. John Neumann’s 10-years’ worth of barn sales was followed by a two to three year break.

But in 1987, St. Peter Parish, Geneva, parishioner Mary Jaeger found herself bringing the sale to her parish.

Jaeger was on the St. Peter Parish Council at the time, and the parish had a $120,000 debt that was preventing anything from moving forward. At one council meeting, in a moment she calls “pure grace,” Jaeger asked, “Why don’t we do what St. John Neumann did to build their church?”

“Dead silence” followed someone’s “Who will do it?” question, she says. She found herself volunteering to chair the effort.

Then, she says, “We prayed, I mean seriously prayed every time we got together as a group, that we’d make $25,000 that first sale.”

Fortunately, Jaeger’s older sister, Bette Koehler, and her husband, Vince, had co-chaired the St. John Neumann Barn Sale when it started, and Jaeger says they taught her “how to barn sale.”

Months of hard work later, at sale’s end when just a few men were left cleaning up, Jaeger went over to the rectory and got the news — they had made between $60,000 and $75,000.

“I ran across the parking lot to tell the fellas who were left,” she says. “I was crying. Without asking, they formed a circle to pray. It was very powerful.”

Jaeger is quick to say that the money raised from the barn sales has never been the best part of what the parish experienced. Of greatest importance, she says, was that “it pulled the parish together.”

She credits Msgr. James McLoughlin, new to the parish that first Geneva Barn Sale year, for much of that community building.

“He was involved in everything we did,” she says. “On Saturdays, he was out there in bib overalls to work with us. Evenings, he’d come by to help. And right before the sale began, he would gather all the workers, give a pep talk and a blessing. By then, we had a thousand people waiting to get in. They saw (the prayer gathering), and he extended the blessing to them.”

Their new pastor also started a Barn Sale tradition. Realizing how exhausted everyone would be on Sunday morning and how difficult it would be for them to come to morning Mass, Msgr. McLoughlin offered Mass in a tent after the sale on Saturday night. That Mass, Jaeger says, was one of the most joyful she’d experienced.

“He was so positive and grateful to them for their efforts,” she said. “We had a workers’ Mass every Saturday for the rest of the years. The gift was that he enabled the people. It just made the parish bloom.”

In return, she says, Msgr. McLoughlin noticed that by working side-by-side with parishioners, he opened up avenues for his priestly work. “He told me it was a wonderful opportunity for his priesthood,” Jaeger says.

In 1996, St. Peter Parish in Geneva wound up 10 years of hosting barn sales, and Holy Cross Parish in neighboring Batavia accepted the Barn Sale challenge.

The next 10

Sheila Bangs, newly married, joined Holy Cross in its second Barn Sale year. She and her husband had no clue how a sale they’d never heard of would become so important. The couple was recruited soon after they arrived.

“We were part of committees, and then it kind of progressed from there,” Bangs says, describing how they took turns chairing committees, and in 2003, they co-chaired the overall sale.

“There were several aspects to it,” Bangs says.

The parish did benefit from the money raised for their new church building. Parishioners also came to realize it was a ministry that served people in the area who couldn’t afford to meet their household needs.

Also it was, Bangs says, “an outreach.” She recalls a conversation with a shopper about her encounter with one of the parish priests. “He just stopped and blessed me!” said the visitor.

“I thought, gosh, this might be her only exposure to Catholics,” Bangs says. “It was a complete package.”

Bangs and her husband were blessed through the sale too, with friendships.

“If not for the Barn Sale,” she says, “we would not have connected with people I would consider to be lifelong friends.

“The Barn Sale is unlike anything you’ve ever encountered. A lot of dirt. A lot of sweat. Broken things you have to deal with. You really just go through so much with this group of people that you really get to know (them), and you share that common bond … you’re tired, quite physically exhausted … and everybody is in the same boat.”

The final 10

Now in her 80s, Mary Jaeger has worked in the antiques booth during the second decade that St. Peter Parish has presented the Barn Sale.

“We have (other) people who have worked both sets, Jaeger says. One 90-something-year-old woman has worked all 20 years.

Families have worked the barn sale together, too.

Jaeger speculates that “maybe 10 years from now, maybe some of those youngsters will say, ‘I have an idea!’ A couple years ago a young man out of high school was a co-chair. He had been raised on Barn Sales. His parents had been co-chairs. He couldn’t imagine not doing it.”

New leadership has brought some changes, and, Jaeger says, “everything became more sophisticated. If we get a really high-priced item, they go online and sell it rather than put it in the sale. They’re able to make good money that way too.”

O’Leary Volk notes one big change to the sale in this past decade.

“The first 10 years (at St. Peter’s) it was on parish grounds in several huge tents,” she says.

While Holy Cross was running the sale, the Geneva parish “sold a lot of our extra land. In this second set of 10, we knew we couldn’t have it there,” she says. “We literally take over every building at the Kane County Fairgrounds. We’re all under roofs now. It’s just wonderful to not deal with tents.”

The bittersweet ending

The first 10 Geneva Barn Sales helped to fund the St. Peter Church building, and “the second time around was to add a second story to the school and update the facilities,” O’Leary Volk says.

With those debts paid off, proceeds raised in the last two to three years have been for general parish funds and major repairs.

Six experienced families are chairing this final Barn Sale.

“We all joined together instead of recruiting new ones,” O’Leary Volk says. “We all know what we are doing. Every family has been involved from the very first of this second set of 10.

“It makes it kind of nice. Not a lot of brainstorming. We’d worked out most of the kinks. It seems to work.”

In the community, “I think people are completely shocked,” she says. “I think it will be missed. Certainly a lot of people come for the fun (and some are) great bargain seekers.

“We know we give to many people who would not have (something) if they could not get it here. We know children have had Christmases because of things parents have bought here,” she adds.

St. Peter parishioners are finding the ending to be “bittersweet,” O’Leary Volks says.

“Some are tired of it,” she says. “But for those of us involved, it’s going to be a mixed thing. We really are sad it is done — that’s the general feeling of most people.

“But we as a parish, we have other things we’d like to give a try — other areas to use people’s time and talent.”