{"id":231353,"date":"2026-04-02T05:19:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T05:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/231353\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T05:19:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T05:19:25","slug":"how-a-new-generation-is-reviving-small-town-texas-texas-monthly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/231353\/","title":{"rendered":"How a New Generation Is Reviving Small-Town Texas \u2013 Texas Monthly"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the headline \u201cSmall-Town Revival!\u201d <\/p>\n

Richard Platt and his wife, Miranda, began plotting their escape in 2008. They had moved to Austin in the early aughts \u201cfor the same reasons that most young people were moving to Austin at the\u00a0time: to play music and experience life,\u201d Richard says.<\/p>\n

They had both dropped out of Howard Payne University, in Brownwood, and those first few years in Austin were like a Jerry Jeff Walker song. \u201cWe were really living it up, seeing our favorite bands, swimming in Barton Springs, and attending more house parties than you can count,\u201d he recalls. But things changed when other responsibilities crept in. He and Miranda got married, and kids came soon after. They needed more space, and they found themselves bouncing from apartment to apartment, fleeing skyrocketing rents. They both landed good jobs at Whole Foods, but the expenses kept mounting. \u201cI had moved up into management with the company and was doing well financially, but\u00a0we never seemed to make ends meet in Austin,\u201d he says. \u201cIt seemed at the time that all we were doing with our lives was working and paying bills.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so he and Miranda and a group of friends bought a parcel of land near Lockhart, about thirty miles south of the city. They had hoped to create a sort of commune\u2014a rural complex combining sustainable housing and permaculture farming\u2014but it never got off the ground. Juggling that project with living and working in Austin proved too much of a burden. Yet he and Miranda were feeling the pull of Lockhart more keenly than ever. To them, Lockhart was the key to independence, to making their own way in the world.<\/p>\n

The town has long cast a curious spell on visitors. Back in 1957 the Architectural Record, a national trade magazine, published an essay penned by architectural historian and critic Colin Rowe, who was teaching in Austin at the time. He saw Lockhart as an exemplar of a Western American town whose square is comparable to \u201cthe piazzas of Italy.\u201d But instead of a church at the center, Lockhart is built around its 1894 courthouse, an \u201cexuberant\u201d and \u201cmore than unusually brilliant\u201d edifice. He described towns like Lockhart as \u201cvery minor triumphs of urbanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ The Caldwell County courthouse, in downtown Lockhart. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

The Platts saw it the same way. Why not head into Lockhart full bore, they thought? After all, Richard had always dreamed of opening his own restaurant, and there were only a few on the square. The town\u2019s famous barbecue joints\u2014Smitty\u2019s, Black\u2019s, and Kreuz\u2014catered as much to pilgrims as to locals. Surely the locals would enjoy some variety. And start-up costs were low compared with what they would be in Austin. \u201cIt seemed like there was this whole downtown here nobody was using,\u201d Richard says.<\/p>\n

In 2012, while continuing to clock in at their day jobs, they began making plans in earnest, scouting locations and brainstorming potential menus. Three years later they dove into the deep end. Partnering with a couple of friends, Chris Hoyt and Layne Tanner, they cashed out their 401(k)s and tapped their savings accounts to open a pizzeria called Loop & Lil\u2019s (named after the parakeets who make a cameo in Townes Van Zandt\u2019s \u201cIf I Needed You\u201d). At the time, Lockhart\u2019s square looked much like it had when Rowe visited some sixty years earlier. The 1894 limestone-and-sandstone Caldwell County courthouse, perhaps the finest expression of small-town civic architecture in all of Texas, still majestically lorded over the town. And the other curiously elegant buildings were still occupied by the kinds of businesses you might find anywhere from Waxahachie to Pecos: a barbershop, a bank or two, law offices, insurance agencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Loop & Lil\u2019s struck out at first; there was an awkward phase. Some of the pizzeria\u2019s ingredients\u2014artichokes, capers, sun-dried tomatoes\u2014were foreign to a populace accustomed to Domino\u2019s. But the Platts got over that hump. The tables started filling up night after night.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Loop The interior of Loop & Lil’s. Photograph by Matt Johnson \"Richard Richard and Miranda Platt, co-owners of Loop & Lil\u2019s. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Left: The interior of Loop & Lil’s. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Top: Richard and Miranda Platt, co-owners of Loop & Lil\u2019s. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Word of their success got out, and others followed. A couple of the Platts\u2019 friends from Austin, Taylor and Austin Burge,\u00a0opened Chaparral Coffee, for which another friend, Dayna Humbert, supplied the pastries. A Whole Foods buddy, French-trained chef Sutton Van Gunten, opened Market Street Cafe and Apothecary. Next to come was Lockhart Bistro, opened by Mumbai-born chef Parind Vora. Soon the Caracara Brewing Company, started by Mike Mann, a University of Texas at Austin alum, set up shop, as did bars aplenty. Lockhart native Ronda Reagan opened up one of these watering holes, the Pearl, renovating a Victorian building to house her upscale cocktail lounge.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that today\u2019s downtown Lockhart is all hip restaurants and bars. It still retains its real estate, insurance, and law offices. There\u2019s the Dr. Eugene Clark Library\u2014built in 1899, it is the oldest continuously operating establishment of its kind in Texas. There remain about a dozen churches within a few blocks of the courthouse. And as with many other small towns, Lockhart had already repurposed its former 1920s movie palace. The Gaslight-Baker Theatre stages plays, vaudeville, and variety shows.<\/p>\n

Yet in the past few years the town has undergone a striking transformation, something that longtime locals are still taking stock of.<\/p>\n

In June a new restaurant, the Culinary Room, held its grand opening. Housed in a handsome three-story 1898 red-brick building on the square, it offers artisanal cheeses and charcuterie, serves craft beer and wine, and hosts chef-taught cooking classes. Save for the architecture, it\u2019s the sort of business you\u2019d expect to find in Houston\u2019s River Oaks or Dallas\u2019s Park Cities. On the town\u2019s bustling Facebook page, long-term Lockhart resident James Bliss, a 45-year-old electrical contractor who lives five blocks from the courthouse, claimed he had a bit of an epiphany when he attended the grand opening. \u201cNew and different don\u2019t mean scary and bad, it just means different,\u201d he wrote, though he admitted some uneasiness. \u201cAs I walked around the store I realized that I didn\u2019t know anyone there. It almost made me feel like an outsider.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Parker, a 45-year-old IT architect who lives in nearby McMahan, chimed in. \u201cGet ready for more weirdos, hippies, artists, musicians and freaks in Lockhart because they sure as hell can\u2019t live in Austin anymore,\u201d he opined. \u201cOn balance that\u2019s probably a good thing, but change like we\u2019ve never seen is coming and coming rapidly due to the economic conditions just to the north of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The Exterior of the Culinary Room. Photograph by Matt Johnson \"Caracara The Caracara Brewing Company in Lockhart. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Left: Exterior of the Culinary Room. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Top: The Caracara Brewing Company in Lockhart. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Just shy of three years ago, in the pages of this magazine, I wrote an article on the state\u2019s frenzied real estate boom, titled \u201cCan You Afford to Live Here?\u201d To try to ascertain what skyrocketing home prices were doing to our biggest cities, and to the folks living there, I spent a week probing the likes of Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. My conclusion wasn\u2019t particularly optimistic. \u201cMy road trip made me realize that our cities are getting denser and more vibrant, but I worry that the cost is unsustainable,\u201d I wrote.\u00a0\u201cHome prices and rents are heading nowhere but up. New affordable housing is in short supply. Incomes are flatlining or trending down. When it comes to owning a home in Texas, I\u2019m reminded of that song by James McMurtry: we can\u2019t make it here anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little did I know at the time that the \u201ceconomic conditions\u201d burdening the citizens of our cities were inspiring a renaissance in other parts of Texas\u2014namely, in small towns. In many ways, that shift is counterintuitive. Though many Texans still regard our state as having a rural sensibility, we became city slickers long ago. In 1910 roughly 24 percent of the Texas population resided in urban areas; a century later that number had jumped to 85 percent.<\/p>\n

And much like elsewhere in the country, our younger generations are especially drawn to the kinds of amenities offered by cities. From my article three years ago: \u201cAccording to a 2014 Nielsen survey, 62 percent of millennials prefer walkable urban environments, which reverses a ninety-year-old trend favoring the burbs over cities. That same survey found that Austin led the nation in the percentage of millennials who favor a \u2018conscious, creative environment,\u2019 with Houston and Dallas\u2013Fort Worth also in the top ten.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that this idealized urban lifestyle is out of reach for most. The culprits? \u201cStudent\u00a0loan debt, wage stagnation, rising rents, insurance costs, and the lingering aftermath of the Great Recession, which many millennials ran right into at a key career stage,\u201d says Jason Dorsey, the president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, an Austin-based research and marketing strategy firm that tracks social trends among millennials and Generation Z.<\/p>\n

These economic burdens, combined with soaring real estate prices, have meant that many have started looking farther afield for places to settle: according to Zillow, the median home value in Austin is now $346,000; in Lockhart, it is $148,000. And it\u2019s not just millennials; folks of all stripes have found that small towns are a land of opportunity. \u201cEmployees, office space, and additional resources are often less expensive in nonurban areas, often making it more cost-efficient to start and build a business,\u201d Dorsey says.<\/p>\n

\"Rollfast\"RollfastRollfast Ranchwear, with co-owner Ben Sparks shaping a hat.Photograph by Matt Johnson<\/p>\n

In fact, many small towns are ripe for rejuvenation. The industries that once sustained rural communities have been in a gradual, inevitable decline, creating a vacuum. \u201cWhile it\u2019s [only] an emerging trend now, we do think that smaller towns, particularly those strategically close to cities, have the ability to attract and keep young entrepreneurs as they build their businesses,\u201d Dorsey says.<\/p>\n

Perhaps not so coincidentally, this trend has also corresponded with the rise of Waco\u2019s favorite son and daughter, Chip and Joanna Gaines, whose reality show Fixer Upper was nothing short of a revelation for viewers dealing with daunting real estate markets in metropolitan areas. For many, watching the Gaineses\u2019 dramatic home renovations, completed for a fraction of what you\u2019d pay in the city, felt like wish fulfillment. And some of those viewers actually decided to chase the dream.<\/p>\n

So this summer I embarked on another road trip, this time striking out for the hamlets of Brenham, Alpine, and Lockhart\u2014towns where the rural renaissance is well underway\u2014to see for myself how these shifts are playing out. I wanted to know who these people are. In what ways are they changing the towns they\u2019ve descended upon? And what do locals make of their arrival?<\/p>\n

To those of us raised on Blue Bell commercials, Brenham and the surrounding countryside have long represented a Texas Shangri-la, a land filled with tin-roofed farmhouses where kindly grandmothers step out onto the porch and holler for us to come on home. We\u2019d happily do so, of course, trotting through pastures shaded by live oaks and pecans, while Longhorns obliviously stamped bluebonnets and lightning bugs flickered overhead. We\u2019d pass by several family homesteads, including one dating back to Stephen F. Austin\u2019s Old Three Hundred colony, and upon arrival we\u2019d be served a bowl of butter-pecan ice cream.<\/p>\n

You might have expected some stiff resistance to these incursions of new folks and their fancy ideas. I certainly did.<\/p>\n

Of course, that fantasy hasn\u2019t held up these past few years. Blue Bell\u2019s woes are well known: the listeria crisis of 2015 tarnished the image of one of Texas\u2019s most beloved brands and visited real economic consequences on the town. Two thirds\u00a0of the company\u2019s workforce was either laid off or furloughed, and the plant in Brenham, which once hosted 225,000 visitors a year on ticketed tours, was temporarily shut down. It\u2019s hard to overstate the effect this disaster had on the town. It bordered on a full-blown existential crisis.<\/p>\n

And yet, against all odds, Brenham\u2019s downtown is thriving, perhaps as never before. Once placid and puritanical, it is now merry with wine, beer, and song. Hip murals blanket the walls of several edifices. The dining scene has been upgraded. And much of that development was fostered by Brad and Jenny Stufflebeam. <\/p>\n

Brenham\u2019s downtown renaissance began, in part, with a seed planted in the lush and rolling Washington County soil. Literally. Sitting in the Stufflebeams\u2019 laid-back biergarten, serenaded by birdsong and an alt-country soundtrack, I heard the whole story from Brad, delivered in his good-natured growl of a voice. <\/p>\n

Brad, 47, grew up in the Dallas burbs and has been running from them ever since. After a stint in the Navy in the early nineties, during which he studied horticulture in his limited spare time, he returned home in 1993 and married Jenny, his high school sweetheart. They spent their nest egg on Greenhouse Gardens, an organic plant nursery in McKinney, which was then still somewhat out in the country.<\/p>\n

Such was not to last. Dallas sprawl was on the march, and when a Home Depot popped up across the highway, the Stufflebeams looked to get out. They arrived in the Brenham area in 2004 and settled on 22 acres of prime Washington County farmland. They started a community supported agriculture program, which allows farmers to sell their produce to urbanites via a subscription service. Brad approached neighboring farmers and persuaded them to join him; soon, a syndicate of twelve area farms was providing roughly 360 Houston families and a handful of restaurants with farm-to-table eggs, vegetables, cheeses, honey, poultry, beef, and pork.<\/p>\n

\"home The courtyard at Home Sweet Farm. Photograph by Matt Johnson \"Jenny Jenny and Brad Stufflebeam. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

They were reviving an old way of life. Long ago the Brenham area served as Houston\u2019s breadbasket. On Friday evenings the rough road heading southeast out of Brenham, toward Houston (pretty much today\u2019s Highway 290), was lined with a steady stream of rumbling wagons driven by mostly German \u201ctruck farmers,\u201d bringing their produce to sell in Houston\u2019s teeming downtown Market Square.\u00a0\u201cAt first my neighbors didn\u2019t understand the CSA thing,\u201d Brad says. \u201cAnd I would just tell \u2019em, \u2018It\u2019s truck farming. I am going into Houston and into neighborhoods and delivering food to people down there.\u2019 And they would be like, \u2018Oh yeah! That\u2019s what my grandfather used to do!\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013 the Stufflebeams made the leap to brick-and-mortar, leasing a late nineteenth century downtown building and opening an organic grocery. Home Sweet Farm, they named it. \u201cIt was time to put our heart in the community we live in instead of feeding people in Houston,\u201d Brad says. \u201cAnd Brenham kinda needed a kick in the spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did it ever. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the Blue Bell thing happened, [the city] realized they were putting too many eggs in one basket,\u201d Brad says. \u201cThey saw a twenty percent drop in their tourism, and they realized other things were important for the Brenham experience as well.\u201d <\/p>\n

To lure more customers, the Stufflebeams threw six Texas craft beer taps on the wall. Business boomed. Home Sweet Farm did well enough for Brad and Jenny to expand into two adjacent buildings, and then they filled in the gap between the structures with a stage improvised from an old loading dock. They wheeled in some picnic tables, and\u2014voil\u00e0\u2014they were now the proud owners of a small music venue and biergarten. \u201cEverybody came out of the woodwork,\u201d Brad says. \u201cWe\u2019ll squeeze in 150 people on a weekend night.\u201d <\/p>\n

As in Lockhart, one success story created a domino effect, and other new mom-and-pop businesses followed. There\u2019s Las Americas, a pan-Latin restaurant. There\u2019s also 96 West, a New American comfort-food place offering tapas alongside burgers. And amid much hoopla from the barbecue cognoscenti, Truth Barbecue popped up on Highway 290 west of town.<\/p>\n

\"Brenham The main square in Brenham. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Later, Brad walked me around the corner to the Brazos Valley Brewing Company (along the way he showed me a line of small warehouses slated to become art galleries), where I retired to the patio with owner Josh Bass. Josh laid out the strategic benefits of Brenham\u2019s location. He\u2019d considered Fredericksburg and was briefly enticed by the tourism it attracted, but why put a brewery way out there when you could put one in Brenham, close to two of the state\u2019s thirstiest college towns (Austin and College Station) and also the state\u2019s largest city, Houston? \u201cBrenham also had that vibe going for it,\u201d he says. If the crowds at the bar that afternoon were any indication, the bet paid off. <\/p>\n

As I looked around the square, I realized that Brenham is changing, but not so much that you wouldn\u2019t recognize it\u2014the Blue Bell plant has even rebounded. The town is just wearing more fashionable clothes these days. \u201cWe\u2019re embracing the modern of today but still cherishing the heritage,\u201d Brad told me that afternoon. And he let me in on his next big idea. He thinks Brenham could become a music destination. \u201cWe\u2019d catch all these artists between Austin and Houston. It\u2019d be a real, authentic thing. Be unplugged, close to the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about the way Brenham feels now: like a city unplugged. Perhaps a different vision from the Blue Bell commercials we grew up with but an enticing version of the Texas dream nonetheless. \u201cCandy Land for Texas,\u201d Brad terms the area. \u201cThe Texas good life, Houston\u2019s Hill Country.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Home Texas microbrews at Home Sweet Farm. Photograph by Matt Johnson \"LJ's Matt Lowery at LJ\u2019s BBQ. Photograph by Matt Johnson <\/p>\n

Nobody ever put to paper a more detailed and specific depiction of the Texas dream than Putnam-bred Larry L. King, the author, journalist, and playwright most widely known for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In a 1975 essay titled \u201cPlaying Cowboy,\u201d he described his Texan dream as an \u201cimprobable corner of paradise.\u201d It would be centered on a \u201crustic, rambling ranch house\u201d with a \u201cclear-singing creek nearby,\u201d and that burbling brook would be shaded by groves of trees \u201cunder which, possibly, the Sons of the Pioneers will play perpetual string-band concerts.\u201d All of this, King wrote, would be located \u201cabout one easy hour out of Austin\u201d and \u201cexactly six miles from a tiny, unnamed town looking remarkably like what Walt Disney would have built for a cheery, heart-tugging Texas-based story happening about 1940.\u201d <\/p>\n

If Brenham and Lockhart jibe with King\u2019s vision improbably well, Alpine, way out in West Texas, is in a league all its own.\u00a0 The town\u2019s unofficial new slogan, \u201cAustin may be weird, but Alpine is far out,\u201d was borne out for me late one night when I was on a starlit downtown stroll. I suddenly found myself in the company of a twelve-point mule deer buck. We were the only two living souls out and about at that hour, and I found the clip-clop of his hooves on the pavement reassuring. <\/p>\n

Many who yearn for the kind of isolation offered by this part of the state cite Marfa as their first choice. The trouble with that plan is that even with all its hipster cred, Marfa continues to shed year-round population. Driven by the wartime economy, its populace peaked in\u00a01945, at around 5,000. By 1990 it was half that amount, and the gradual decline has continued in the decades since. By 2017 the population was less than 1,800. So, although Marfa is gaining cachet, it is losing people, thanks to second-home buyers, short-term-rental profiteers, and speculators. The working class has been priced out to Alpine and Fort Davis or away from the area entirely. <\/p>\n

By contrast, Alpine has held relatively steady, hovering around 5,000 to 6,000 people since 1950. Marfa is indubitably a tr\u00e8s chic oasis of cool, but it is becoming less an actual town than an amusement park for the well-heeled. \u201cHigh school sweethearts have to move away from there now,\u201d says Harry Mois, the owner of Harry\u2019s Tinaja bar, in Alpine. \u201cThere is something not right about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Alpine\"\/ An aerial view of Alpine. Photograph by Wynn Myers <\/p>\n

Mois came to Alpine in 1999, after adventures in the French Marquesas Islands and Colorado. He was just passing through but found the open space and clean air he craved, and he ended up staying. He also discovered that Alpine was developing an interesting cultural scene all its own.<\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s still a rugged town, Alpine has its frills. There\u2019s the Maverick Inn, an old motel made over in a toned-down Hotel San Jos\u00e9 style. There\u2019s a boutique hotel in the heart of downtown, the ninety-year-old Holland Hotel, complete with a fine-dining establishment on the ground floor. There\u2019s the java spot Plaine (an anagram for Alpine), which shares a building with a laundromat\u2014and an independent vinyl store, RingTail Records. As any hip small town must, Alpine also produces its own beer. Big Bend Brewing Co.\u2014\u201cThe Beer From Out Here\u201d\u2014launched six years ago.<\/p>\n

The food truck park, along the main drag on Holland Avenue, is ringed by muraled walls, and the fare is surprisingly exotic. That\u2019s where Greg Green runs the Smokin\u2019 Cuban. He grew up here and moved back in 2015 to open the food truck with Emma Diamond, a friend whose background was in Cuban-infused South Florida cooking. \u201cAnd mine was spent in Texas cooking barbecue, so we fused the two and became the Smokin\u2019 Cuban!\u201d Green says.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a new-and-used bookstore, Front Street Books, whose owner, Jean Hardy-Pittman (she has since retired), told me she was so smitten with Alpine\u2019s flora\u2014spiky Spanish daggers and spindly ocotillos\u2014that she ditched her professional life in Houston to be closer to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Alpine, of course, you are leaving behind the creature comforts most Texans take for granted; the nearest Whataburger and H-E-B are a 143-mile trip to Odessa. It\u2019s a smidge too remote for my own dispositions, but I could still understand the allure. One afternoon I met artist Tom Curry, who moved here in 1993 because he was attracted to its remoteness and the unspoiled frontier. Of course, there\u2019s also the added bonus of proximity to the spectacular scenery of Big Bend. And then there are those amazing cerulean skies, bright blue by day and a river of stars by night. It\u2019s enough to give you pause and make you wonder:\u00a0is it time I consider leaving life in the city behind?<\/p>\n

\"Holland The Holland Hotel in Alpine. Photograph by Wynn Myers \"Big Big Bend Brewing Co. Photograph by Wynn Myers <\/p>\n

Lockhart native Bobby Herzog, 34, grew up with conflicting visions of his hometown. There were the stories from the old folks, who reminisced about a lively downtown, bustling with people shoulder to shoulder on the weekends. And then there was the reality of his youth: other than law and real estate offices and barbershops, the square was dead. Well, not quite. \u201cYou could come downtown at night to watch the bats fly out of the abandoned buildings,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

Today Herzog, who manages a furniture store on the square, recalls the trepidation his fellow natives felt at first about the new \u201ckids\u201d in town. \u201cLockhart is a friendly community that just wasn\u2019t used to change,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Still, the speed of that change concerned him, and to help the new and the old blend in harmony, he took the helm of the Downtown Business Association in January 2017. \u201cAt times I was called crazy to mix so many different personalities in to one small organization, but I can tell you that there is no other small town in Texas that has this many creative minds that all hold their town dear to them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

You might have expected some stiff resistance to these incursions of new folks and their fancy ideas. I certainly did. As Dorsey, the millennial expert, puts it, \u201cSome smaller towns and communities still have a good old boys network that can be tough to break into or work around.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I found quite the opposite to be true. Sure, there was the inevitable grumbling. Herzog told me that in Lockhart he would hear occasional cracks like \u201cThe hipsters are taking over\u201d or \u201cGo back to Austin,\u201d but he believes these were far more bark than bite. All across town, there are signs that old and new have joined forces in unlikely ways. When I asked Richard Platt about this, he told me about the scene at Load Off Fanny\u2019s, the music venue and dive bar that he and Miranda and their partners recently opened. \u201cOn a\u00a0Friday\u00a0night it\u2019s not uncommon to see young\u00a0metal kids\u00a0sitting at the bar with diesel mechanics and ranch hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judging from a sustained debate I read on Lockhart\u2019s Facebook page, the town\u2019s main source of distress is the seemingly inevitable march of suburbia southward from Austin.<\/p>\n

In Brenham, where suburbs are not an imminent threat, the blowback is more about what the late Australian art critic Robert Hughes called \u201cthe shock of the new.\u201d When the Texas Arts and Music Festival, which enters its third year this October, commissioned a series of modern murals across several downtown buildings, there was some peevish reaction. In the comments section of an article announcing the murals, someone called them ugly: \u201cThey\u2019re all very new-age and \u2018Austin-ish\u2019 and clash with the traditional atmosphere of Downtown. While the artwork is very high quality, these types of murals are better suited for Austin than Downtown Brenham.\u201d<\/p>\n

But most of the commenters echoed the sentiments of one person who identified as a native who had left Brenham and returned home to raise a family. The murals were just the ticket to help Brenham continue to thrive, they contended: \u201cWe always hear that we can\u2019t keep Brenham kids in Brenham. Well if you want to get college graduates from Brenham, back to Brenham, you have to give them something to come back to. I love the scene in downtown. It\u2019s got great places to hang out and have a beer that are cool and family friendly. This town literally had nothing like that when I was growing up here throughout the 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Brenham\"\"Brenham\"Shot on East Main Street, in Brenham.Photograph by Matt Johnson<\/p>\n

When I spoke to Jennifer Phillips, who works for the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, she said she doesn\u2019t like all of the edgy murals, but she welcomes their presence just the same: \u201cIn order for our little town to thrive, things can\u2019t continue to stay the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s recap: there\u2019s affordability, a slower pace of life, top-shelf food\u00a0and culture, and a welcoming, friendly community. During my travels, I found myself\u2014a near-lifelong Houston resident\u2014increasingly bewitched by the notion of small-town life. I began dreaming, to paraphrase Guy Clark\u2019s \u201cL.A. Freeway,\u201d of packing up the dishes, making note of all good wishes, saying adi\u00f3s to all this concrete, and getting me some dirt-road backstreets.<\/p>\n

On a warm April evening, I strolled around downtown Lockhart and watched young mothers chatting and sipping coffee at sidewalk cafes while their toddlers played with dollhouses and Matchbox cars on the sidewalk. I could hear sparrows cheeping, even a songbird whistling away.<\/p>\n

Who needs a teeming metropolis when you can re-create the best parts of it at a fraction of the price and about half the stress?<\/p>\n

I pictured myself building a new life here with my wife and daughter, sliding right into a community of like-minded friends, maybe even taking a leatherworking class one weekend at Lockhart Arts and Craft, enjoying the secular fellowship.<\/p>\n

At my age, racing up to fifty, there is just as much push from the big cities as there is a pull from these towns. Houston is not as cheap as it used to be; once-affordable neighborhoods like Montrose are now downright expensive. There\u2019s the never-ending grind of the city\u2019s continuous evolution, a process that largely involves tearing down all its landmark homes and legacy businesses and replacing them with luxury apartment buildings, anonymous townhomes, and chain establishments. I now get turned around in neighborhoods I\u2019ve been steeped in for a half century. My dad\u2019s boyhood home, in West University Place; my daughter\u2019s first home, near Rice University; the house in which I was conceived, in Montrose; my great-grandfather\u2019s home, near the Galleria\u2014all have been leveled and replaced with things that are bigger, uglier, and costlier.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t just the rustic life I was longing for. Each of these towns was starting to put me in mind of little country places I\u2019d tramped through in England during my wanderlust years, a version of a Cotswolds village. It felt like a place where I could finally exhale. <\/p>\n

Sara Barr, the 33-year-old co-owner of Lockhart Arts and Craft, says I am not the first to hazard such comparisons: she says she\u2019s heard similar sentiments from French, German, Scottish, Irish,\u00a0and Australian tourists. \u201cThey\u2019ll say stuff like, \u2018This reminds me so much of this certain neighborhood of Paris\u2019 or \u2018This is just like a little town outside Berlin.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Plaine The Plaine coffee shop in Alpine. Photograph by Wynn Myers <\/p>\n

Richard Platt also sees the European comparison as apt. Lockhart\u2019s square, he says, is built around the works of a group of local craftsmen sharing their wares. He and his family live a few blocks away, and he says he seldom has to make the drive out to Walmart. \u201cThere is [often] a viable alternative made by someone I know right here in town,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A typical day for him starts with a nice cup of coffee and a fresh, scratch-baked pastry. A modernized Texas comfort food lunch at the Market Street Cafe comes next, and then he starts tossing pies at Loop & Lil\u2019s. When he\u2019s finished there, it\u2019s off to a quick beer at Caracara and then maybe a stroll through an art gallery or a play at Gaslight-Baker. The point is, there is no mandatory driving, there are no generic national chains, everybody is their own boss, and they are all nice to one another. \u201cWe\u00a0have really just created our\u00a0own microeconomy right here on the\u00a0square, full of the life and culture that\u00a0leads most people to the big cities in the first place,\u201d he says. And they have done so, he adds, \u201cwith all the small-town feel of\u00a0home.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe small towns in Texas seem to be the only places left where people in my generation have a chance to start something from scratch with little money to invest, as long as they work hard and are skilled at what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I sat on a downtown bench alongside Barr, an Austin native, she lamented the intensifying pace of the city. She says there used to be an ineffable simplicity to Austin: \u201cYou could walk down the street in certain parts of town and see people you knew, always run into your friends at the Broken Spoke or Ginny\u2019s, and lots of places still felt just like walking into a friend\u2019s house.\u201d Less so today, she says. \u201cThe idea of simplicity appeals to me a lot, being able to actually just walk around town and go to businesses where you know the owners because they\u2019re there all the time and they\u2019re friendly and welcoming.\u201d<\/p>\n

It harks back to what the experts say about millennials, how they want walkable urban environments. Maybe the only places they can find those today are in spots like Lockhart, that minor triumph of urbanity. Who needs a teeming metropolis when you can re-create the best parts of it at a fraction of the price and about half the stress? Such places are like a distilled version of the city, leaving only the stuff you love.<\/p>\n

Or, as Barr puts it, \u201cThis is the Austin I\u2019ve always wanted.\u201d <\/p>\n

Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the headline \u201cSmall-Town Revival!\u201d Richard Platt and his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[12217,89492,132,134,133,45974,21854,12299,111,89493,89482],"class_list":{"0":"post-231353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-alpine","9":"tag-august-2018-issue","10":"tag-austin","11":"tag-austin-headlines","12":"tag-austin-news","13":"tag-lockhart","14":"tag-longreads","15":"tag-marfa","16":"tag-real-estate","17":"tag-small-towns","18":"tag-the-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}