The halls and the walls of Harris Regional’s Hospital Auxiliary are lined with a host of forsaken goods. Bags upon boxes upon bags of men’s sports jackets, baby clothes, martini glasses, wedding dresses, candlesticks, winter coats and then some have been sorted and separated, each item going into its own special “department” as handwritten signs on scraps of cardboard proclaim.

These departments as they are, would have once been referred to with less retail-like names — the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. The Auxiliary is located in a turn of the century two-story house on the corner of Walnut Street in Sylva, formerly belonging to one of the oldest doctors in town, Dr. Nichols.

But now, after more than 20 years of this house serving as one of the primary sources for emergency clothing, great hand-me-downs and school play costumes and props, the Auxiliary will be moving from its downtown location and the historic house put on the market. The move is drawing mixed reactions from Auxiliary volunteers and shoppers.

“It’ll be good to have it all on one floor, but I think it would be better downtown,” said volunteer Denia Estes.

“Whenever I’m in town I come here, but at the same time it would be good for it to move,” said Rachel Bridges, who spent last Wednesday afternoon looking for baby clothes.

This fall, the Auxiliary will move to a home site off Skyland Drive, a location closer to the hospital, for which there are tentative plans to also use to house a day care for hospital workers’ children, said Brian Thomas, Harris Regional’s director of marketing and public relations.

“They’ll probably build a metal building to accommodate the thrift shop,” Thomas said.

While losing much of its charm, the new Auxiliary location will be larger and provide one-story accommodations — a plus for volunteers who, tending to be older, have grown tired of the existing Auxiliary’s stairs.

The new location will mark at least the seventh home for the Auxiliary. Formed in 1962, the Auxiliary began not as a thrift store but as a fund-raising arm for the hospital, selling cookies, fruitcakes and candles, said Polly Fuller, who at 94 is one of the Auxiliary’s charter members.

“We asked, what does an Auxiliary do?,” Fuller said, of the dozen or so women who first gathered to form the Auxiliary. “(Hospital administrators) said just raise money so that we could buy things that otherwise we would have a hard time buying.”

But fruitcakes and candles didn’t get them very far.

“At first we had an awfully hard time,” Fuller said.

The Auxiliary jumped around from the old Ritz Theater — since torn down to make a parking lot — the basement of a service station, the foyer of the old Northwestern Bank — so small that it could only be used for storage, items were drug out on the sidewalk for Saturday sales — the American Legion and First Baptist Church annex — also torn down.

The Auxiliary found a more permanent home in the 1980s when W.C. Hennessee finally decided that the Auxiliary had done enough for the hospital to deserve better. At the time the Auxiliary was raising about $30,000 per year for the hospital. The Nichols house was on the market and Hennessee put out an ultimatum to the hospital.

“He said, ‘If you don’t buy it, I’ll write a check for it myself’,” said Don Morgan, a now retired Harris administrator.

The hospital anted up and the Auxiliary moved in.

Over the years, the Auxiliary has raised more than $1 million for Harris Regional and the overarching WestCare Health System, allowing for the purchase of items such as defibrulators, an ambulance and a $75,000 investment in the Alzeheimer’s/Dementia Care Unit at Mountain Trace Nursing Home in Sylva. Recently the Auxiliary surpassed its goal of raising $96,000 to purchase a new anesthesia machine for the hospital’s operating room, fetal monitoring equipment and a hospital bed for the Labor & Delivery Department.

The question is whether the Auxiliary will be able to maintain its fundraising capacity with a larger, but more out of the way location.

“What we’ve heard from people who work there is most of the people who shop there will find it regardless of where it is,” Thomas said.

Such seems to be the case, at least for those who use the Auxiliary for recreational shopping.

“We’re from Cherokee, we just come over here when we don’t have any place else to go,” Annabelle Marmon said.

The new building for the Auxiliary most likely will be built prior to the house on Walnut Street going on the market.

“The building would be built and then the sale of the existing thrift shop would go to fund the new building and the rest would probably go to the Auxiliary,” Thomas said.

“We’re hoping it’ll help,” volunteer Ollie Maek said.