BackOn a Tuesday morning in late October, Sheila Youngblood got in her Range Rover and headed past fields of grazing horses toward Marburger Farm, in Round Top, Texas. The morning drizzle had just let up, and yellow wildflowers dotted the roadside. Soon, traffic slowed to a crawl, and the wildflowers were replaced by tents full of a bewildering array of merchandise. For most of the year, Round Top has an official population of eighty-seven, but in October and March an estimated hundred thousand visitors come here to visit a sprawling antique market, one of the biggest in the world.
Shoppers have been drawn to Round Top since a pair of Houston socialites hosted the town’s inaugural sale, in 1968. In the early nineties, Youngblood visited the fair for the first time with her grandmother. “It was very small, just a select few buildings and fields,” she said. “But there was just this spirit of treasure hunting.” (As Youngblood recalls, her grandmother bought so many lamps, rugs, and assorted bric-a-brac that she had to tie her Lincoln Continental’s door closed with her purse strap.)
Other antique markets around the country have closed, casualties of the shift to online shopping, but the fair in Round Top has become only bigger. Although it still has the reputation of being a flea-market town, Round Top is transforming into an upscale shopping mecca. This can make visiting feel a little surreal: it’s a place that insists on its quaintness even as it has rapidly outgrown it. As the traffic inched forward, Youngblood pointed out buildings that hadn’t existed a year earlier. “That’s new,” she said, peering out of the window at a barnlike structure made of artfully rusty corrugated tin, part of a new shopping complex. “I think this guy is in the process of adding nine buildings.”
Youngblood has a throaty voice and a penchant for over-the-top looks; the night I met her, she was hosting a dinner party for a hundred people, to which she wore a yellow caftan, a two-foot-high floral headdress, a cascade of necklaces, and a turquoise ring the size of a hockey puck. “She’s the grandmother of Round Top,” the fashion designer Lela Rose told me, then quickly corrected herself. “Not in terms of age, though! She’s . . . the grande dame of Round Top.” Shopping in the town can be overwhelming—there is no one central market but, rather, dozens of different venues, such as Marburger Farm, each with its own schedule and its own collection of venders. Youngblood, a Texas native, has become a kind of unofficial Round Top ambassador, guiding visitors through the chaos. She has shopped with celebrities she prefers not to name (according to gossip, they include Gwen Stefani and the designer Kelly Wearstler), and with people who are less known but no less wealthy. “It’s mostly people who have second, third homes—if you’re buying for multiple houses, this is the place to do it,” Youngblood told me.