ROCHESTER — The Fairgrounds aren’t in use for the Rochester Country Fair this year, but they did see a little bit of use on Aug. 22 for a Scouts BSA Flea Market. 

The Country Fair is usually one of the scouts’ biggest fundraisers, since they help organize parking for the event and request donations in return.

This spring, Scoutmaster Kevin Thompson set up a bottle and can drive to raise money for Troop 31 and Troop 31G, the girls offshoot of the Rochester group. However, now the recycling center is no longer taking cans so he had to suspend operations, while he still had a bunch of them. 

One of the group’s other leaders had done a flea market when he was a scout, and he thought they could revive the idea.

The troop has been collecting donations for the market for over a year, as the flea market was originally scheduled for May. Thompson ambitiously imagined the event taking up most of the fairgrounds, but in the end, storage space limited what the scouts could collect.

Despite being slightly smaller than imagined, the first day of the market was a success. Thompson said that when he got there at 8 a.m. there were already a dozen people in line. 

Since then until about 11 a.m. it had been “a steady stream of people”

The fair worked with slightly modified rules, as the scouts had worked with the Board of Health on how to safely hold the event. Rather than giving shoppers free reign to wander the fair, each shopper was assigned to a scout or volunteer to handle and collect all their items.  

They then touched the items only after checking out. 

Some of the items at the fair defied classification. One volunteer remarked “I was trying to price that and I was like ‘I don’t know what it is to price it!’”

Thompson said that almost everything was under $5 at the market. Items that are not marked are “make an offer” items. But since everything was donated it still enabled the scouts to make a profit. 

“I don’t know what we’ll do next,” for a fundraiser he added. The scouts’ Haunted Hayride in October is somewhat in question due to Eastern Equine Encephalitis, a mosquito-borne disease that causes serious and often deadly swelling in the brain. 

Activities have also proven tricky for the scouts, who can’t go camping overnight. What’s left is daytime camp activities. The scouts have also been helping to fix up they YMCA camp.

The scouts will hold a second day of the fair on Aug. 23 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.