White Elephant Sale Seeks Donations, Volunteers Ahead of 88th Year

With the White Elephant Sale around the corner, organizers are seeking donations of quality items to sell – and volunteers to help sell them.

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Events
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June 8, 2026
Shoppers at a previous White Elephant Sale wait for the bell announcing the 9 a.m. start of the annual tradition. File photo.

OLD LYME, CT – The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme has announced that the ever-popular White Elephant Sale (WES) will return this year on Friday, July 10, and Saturday, July 11. 

The sale is run by the church’s Benevolent Society, with proceeds going to more than 25 nonprofit organizations across the region and around the world. 

Hours for the sale are 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Saturday.

The community is invited to donate items for the sale at a series of  “intake” days beginning later this month from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day. The intake period runs from Thursday, June 25, through Saturday, June 27, and resumes Tuesday, June 30, through Thursday, July 2. 

Volunteers are needed in every area of the sale, with 200 volunteers typically signing up to help collect, sort, price, organize and sell the donated items. Interested volunteers are encouraged to call the church office at 860-434-8686. 

The annual sale was hosted continuously for 83 years prior to 2020, but was cancelled for two consecutive years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It resumed in 2022 and is now in its 88th year. 

More information about the sale, including acceptable items to donate, is available at www.fccol.org/wes. 

Author
Elizabeth Regan

Elizabeth started her journalism career in 2013 with the launch of The Salem Connect, a community news site inspired by digital trailblazers like Olwen Logan. Elizabeth’s earliest reporting included two major fires — one at a package store and another at a log cabin where she captured, on video, a state trooper fatally shooting the unarmed homeowner and suspected arsonist. The experiences gave her a crash course in public record searches, courthouse procedures and the Freedom of Information Act. She went on to report for The Bulletin, CT News Junkie, The Rivereast, and The Day, where she covered the Lymes and helped launch the Housing Solutions Lab on affordable housing. Her work has earned numerous awards from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists and the New England Newspaper & Press Association. Now, after more than a decade in digital, weekly, and daily journalism, she’s grateful to return to the place where it all started: an online news site dedicated to one small corner of Connecticut.

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