But the fair’s popularity as a see-and-be-seen destination doesn’t always translate to increased sales. “This show is just a pressure cooker,” a Midwestern dealer, who asked me not to use his name, said. The tents were full of tipsy would-be shoppers taking selfies, but the buying wasn’t as brisk as he’d hoped. “I’m trying not to panic,” he said. “People don’t want to buy from a sad guy. They want to buy from someone who’s, like, ‘Oh, this is just my hobby.’ But this is how I feed my kids.”

When I told people I was going to meet the mayor of Round Top, they seemed to expect I was in for a charmingly small-town experience. (“Is the mayor a dog?” a friend asked.) In fact, the mayor is a forty-three-year-old property developer from Houston named Mark Massey, who has played a pivotal role in the development—or overdevelopment—of the town. Houston and Austin are among the country’s fastest-growing cities; Round Top, an agricultural community situated halfway between the two—about a ninety-minute drive from either—is in the midst of a building boom. Land that sold for ten thousand dollars an acre eight years ago now goes for ten times as much. Across town, hayfields have been replaced by ranchette developments, and the town is full of new construction that tries, with varying levels of success, to look old.

I met Massey at the Compound, former pastureland that he had converted into a “multi-acre master-planned event-and-entertainment venue.” The Compound’s central building is a white barn with affirmations painted on its eaves: “Dance Proud”; “Be Kind”; “Say Howdy”; “Dream Big”; “Hug Puppies.” We sat in a gazebo bar that was serving a steady stream of pre-noon drinkers. Massey grew up in Houston; during the summers, he’d visit his grandparents’ farm in Round Top for a taste of country life. “You know, fishing, four-wheelers, all that fun stuff,” he said. Massey was working for a developer in Beverly Hills when, in 2010, his mother proposed a family project: they would buy up some old buildings around a historic square in town, restore them, and rent them out to small independent merchants. “That leased out, like, overnight, it seemed,” he said. The town, he realized, had potential. Round Top had what people wanted: “that Hamptons-Aspen-Santa Fe-Marfa kind of feel, you know, that elevated small town,” he said.

Since then, Massey has gone on to develop several more town squares in Round Top, including the Compound. (The others are named for the area’s early German mercantile families: Henkel Square, Minden Square, Fricke Square, Rummel Square.) To assemble them, Massey scoured the countryside for visually pleasing old buildings—“just a quaint cottage look with some character”—to relocate and repurpose. “They put these giant steel beams underneath and lift the house up on a truck,” he said. “Sometimes, depending on the size, they’ll cut the house into pieces. So it’s literally, like, big sections of house moving down this two-lane highway. They have to raise the power lines. It’s crazy. People will pull off the road to take pictures.” Visitors occasionally assume that the developments have been around since the town’s founding.

In 2020, Massey was elected Round Top’s mayor, winning fifty-four votes to his opponent’s thirty-six. His affection for historic preservation has helped insure that, despite the rapid pace of development, Round Top maintains its carefully cultivated image. More than anywhere else I’ve been, it feels like a small town in a Lifetime movie, where neighbors wave hello and there’s not a vape shop, CrossFit studio, or Dollar General to be seen. “People want that life style—going out West, having property, having critters, living off the land,” Massey explained. “That Western kind of pioneer spirit. I think it’s a big deal right now.”

After the Marburger opening, Youngblood hosted another huge dinner party at Rancho Pillow, a hotel-venue compound she opened in 2016. Rancho Pillow has a colorful, geographically indiscriminate aesthetic, like an upscale honky-tonk in a Mexican beach town; there’s an air-conditioned tepee, a heated saltwater wading pool, and a bathhouse with “Listen” painted on its tin roof.

At dinner, I sat across from the jewelry designer Kendra Scott, a regular “guest shark” on “Shark Tank,” who was at Round Top buying for Yellow Rose, her new ranch-inspired brand. “It’s about putting the cowgirl front and center,” she said. She showed me a picture of one of her purchases from the fair: an adult-size mechanical horse from the nineteen-fifties. (In four days of shopping, Scott amassed enough items to fill three trailers.) The look of the moment, she believed, was something rugged but refined. “You know, ‘Yellowstone,’ and how everybody thinks cowboys are sexy now? And cowgirls!” she said. “People want those Beth Dutton vibes. You can be tough and sexy. Like, I can run a billion-dollar brand and then go get on my horse along with my sexy cowboy husband—that’s a great life.”

A lanky, graying man sitting across from Scott shook his head. His name is Evan Voyles, and he described himself as a “recovering dealer” living in Austin. He was cynical about what Round Top had become. “To call it a theme park would be generous,” he said. “There’s interesting stuff in there, but we’ve undermined it. It used to be old buildings, small buildings, small roads. It wasn’t a feeding frenzy. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old, but the stuff isn’t looking so good to me anymore.” Voyles said that, in the early nineties, he had briefly owned the world’s largest collection of vintage cowboy boots, which he’d acquired by travelling the country, scouring secondhand shops. He’d helped supply the market with old boots, then watched it get overcapitalized. Now Los Angeles boutiques sell mediocre Tony Lama boots from the nineties for hundreds of dollars, the thrift stores are full of fast fashion, and it is nearly impossible to find hidden treasures anymore. Everyone seems to know, or think they know, what things were worth. “It’s just like a herd of buffalo builds up over eons, but all it takes is six crazy guys and a market for it to be destroyed in a matter of years,” Voyles said.

I wandered inside to the living room, which was decorated with Youngblood’s antique-fair finds—faded rugs, wrought-iron candelabras. At one edge of the room, a well-worn Western saddle hung from a wooden beam. It was covered with circular pieces of mirror, like a D.I.Y. cowboy disco ball. Youngblood told me later that it had decorated a dance hall in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It was beautiful and strange, and in that moment I desperately wanted to possess it—an old object, full of all the magic I was missing. ♦