What can you buy at Grafton Flea Market? For $2.2 million, the market itself
If you happened to be at the Grafton Flea Market on Sunday, you may have acquired a painting of The Last Supper for $10. Two pairs of sunglasses for $5. Baseball cards, old machinery, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, jewelry, china, or a wooden knife painted with the image of Jason Voorhees from “Friday, the 13th.”
Or, if you had a spare $2.2 million in your pocket, you could have picked up Grafton Flea Market.
After more than 50 years in the business, Harry Peters and his nephew, Michael Peters, have put the 13.5 acre commercial-industrial property up for sale, comprised of both the main market and the parking lot across the street, 293 and 289 Upton Street. There is enough parking for at least 250 vehicles, a building with indoor sales stalls, bathrooms, and a small restaurant, along with an outdoor beer garden.
“We’ve been entertaining some offers,” said Harry Peters, who started up the Grafton Flea Market back in 1970. “Business is excellent, but I’m getting up in age and my nephew is looking to do something else. There’s a lot of goodwill here — we try to work it as a family. The people we meet here are really incredible and I really mean that.”
Some vendors, he added, have gone on to start up their own businesses, including jewelry makers who now sell their wares at a Milford store.
The market is the third potential project to surface in Grafton on a town line, in this case, Upton. Just over the line from Millbury, plans for a 375,000 square foot warehouse is in the planning stages for the front lawn of Wyman-Gordon, which is selling off 26.2 acres of its Worcester Street property and relocating its entrance in the process. Close to the Westborough/Shrewsbury borders, trees are being cleared at 8 Pine Street for the Village at Grafton Woods, a transit-oriented retail/apartment complex under development by GSX Ventures — the same company planning to build a mixed-use complex on the former DPW property on Upton Street.
None of those carry quite the emotional ties of the Grafton Flea Market, one of the oldest continuously running flea markets in Massachusetts. Some of the vendors have had designated spots for decades. Others hand over $35 once a year in lieu of having a yard sale. Families attend in droves, with the young children who first experience the market from a stroller growing up to push their own children past tables in the piney grove.
“We call them BLTS,” one vendor joked. “Browsers, lookers, and touchers. They spend 20 minutes looking at something. We tell them the price and they run like hell.”
Haggling is always a possibility, particularly at the end of the day when vendors are faced with packing up all their unsold goods.
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