The World's Biggest Treasure Hunt RoadyGoat

What is now a global phenomenon started in 1968 as one woman's simple idea. Her name was Emma Lee Turney, and she rented the Round Top Rifle Hall to host a high-quality antiques show. That first show featured 22 dealers. Today, the Round Top Antiques Fair has exploded into a three-week-long spectacle that stretches for over 20 miles along Texas State Highway 237. The fields around you fill with massive tents, barns, and buildings packed with treasures from every corner of the earth. It's not one single event, but a collection of dozens of independent shows that all happen at once, drawing over 100,000 shoppers. It’s an economic miracle that completely transforms this rural landscape, all stemming from that first small gathering at the local dance hall.

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A Concert Hall in a Cow Pasture RoadyGoat

Just outside of town sits Festival Hill, a place that shouldn't exist, but does. In 1971, concert pianist James Dick bought a derelict 19th-century schoolhouse here. He had a vision: to create a world-class environment for young musicians to study and perform. From that single building, he and a dedicated group of locals and patrons built a 210-acre campus, piece by piece. The crown jewel is the Festival Concert Hall, an astonishing, 1,000-seat theater with phenomenal acoustics, built over decades. It's a place where the world's finest musicians come to play, right here in the middle of the Texas countryside. Festival Hill is a testament to a singular vision, proving that great art can blossom in the most unexpected of places.

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Engineering Perfect Sound RoadyGoat

The main concert hall at Festival Hill may look like a magnificent wooden barn, but it is really a finely tuned instrument. The International Festival-Institute was founded here in 1971, and its concert hall went up in stages over the decades that followed — a room built by ear as much as by blueprint, before computer modeling of acoustics was routine. Every surface was planned to control how sound waves behave. The vast, gothic-arched ceiling and the angled wooden panels aren't just decoration; they scatter sound, breaking up harsh echoes and leaving a warm, rich tone in the room. The sheer volume of the space was shaped to give the long, generous reverberation that Romantic and classical repertoire wants. It is geometry and timber doing the work that amplification would otherwise do, so that a single unamplified violin can fill a hall seating twelve hundred people with breathtaking clarity. That is engineering in service of art — and every summer the Texas Festival Orchestra puts it to work.

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Round Top Community

1836

Home of the Townsends, Hills and McH. Winburn, veterans of San Jacinto; Joel W. Robison, one of Santa Anna's captors; John Rice Jones, first postmaster general, Republic of Texas; and John C.C. Hill, boy captive of Mier Expedition and adopted by General Santa Anna. A center of German culture and crafts of 19th century. Examples: Nassau Plantation; Art of Mathias and Rudolph Melchior; Rev. Adam Neuthard's School; Stone Masonry of Carl S. Bauer; Lutheran Church with Wantke's handmade organ; and S. K. Lewis Stage Coach Inn.

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Wandke House

1855

Johann Traugott Wandke (1808-1870) immigrated from Prussia to nearby La Grange with his wife Christiane and two daughters, Karoline and Christiane, in 1855. About 1860 Johann and Christiane came to Round Top to live in the home of their daughter Karoline and her husband Zoellistin Pochmann. They built their own native stone home/workshop at this site about 1863. Johann was a skilled mechanic and cabinetmaker but is best known for the high-quality organs he crafted from native cedar for several churches in the area including Round Top's Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

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Hill, Isaac Lafayette

1836

Isaac Lafayette Hill, soldier, settler, and legislator, the son of John J. "Jack" and Sarah Elizabeth "Sallie" (Parham) Hill, was born on February 1, 1814, in Hillsboro, Jasper County, Georgia. He was the brother of William Pinckney Hill and United States senator Benjamin H. Hill. In 1834 he traveled to Texas with his uncle Asa Hill . Isaac taught school in the Cole settlement in Washington County before joining Company D, First Regiment of Texas Volunteers, as a corporal under the command of Capt. Moseley Baker . He was in command of the ferry at San Felipe during the retreat of the Texas army in April 1836 and subsequently fought at the battle of San Jacinto . In 1845 Isaac settled near Round Top in Fayette County, where he became a prosperous planter and slave owner and represented that county plus Austin and Colorado counties in the Senate of the Fifth and Sixth legislatures (1853-57). In 1863 Hill paid an unknown substitute to serve in his place in Capt. Zebulon M. P. Rabb's company of the Plum Grove Rifles, a Home Guard unit. He later served as a private in Capt. James C. Gaither's company, the Round Top Guerrillas, organized by Brig. Gen. William G. Webb as a volunteer cavalry "to repel armed or hostile invasions of the state." Hill was married three times and had nine children. Two of his wives were Frances Ann Lloyd (married in Austin County in 1845) and Laura Virginia Gantt (married in Fayette County in 1863). During the 1870s he was a promoter and stockholder of the Houston Central railroad. He died at his home on July 18, 1889, and was buried in the Hill Cemetery near Round Top.

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International Festival-Institute At Round Top

1971

Concert pianist James Dick established the Festival-Institute at Round Top in Fayette County in 1971. Dick, a performer with a distinguished career, was uniquely qualified for the task of creating a campus and organization to operate one of the major music festivals in the United States. He graduated from the University of Texas with special honors in piano in 1963 and was a student of pianist and pedagogue Dalies Frantz . Following graduation at UT, he received two Fulbright fellowships for study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and private study with Sir Clifford Curzon. Dick also was a major prizewinner in the Tchaikovsky, Busoni, and Leventritt international competitions and represented the United States on the juries of the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. He was the 2009 Texas Medal of Arts winner. His concert tours take him throughout the United States and abroad each year. The 1971 festival, a ten-day session with ten piano students, included two concerts. During its first five years the Festival-Institute leased facilities, but its master plan of development was soon established for programs and the future permanent campus. The first major facility, the Mary Moody Northen Pavilion, was acquired in 1973. It is the largest single-unit transportable stage in the world and was used for open-air concerts until 1983. The festival was later housed in the 1,200-seat Festival Concert Hall, on which construction began in 1981, until the permanent stage was completed in the Concert Hall in 1993. An abandoned school building and six acres of land east of Round Top, Texas, were acquired in 1973 for a future campus to be named Festival Hill. Festival Hill grew gradually until it became a beautifully landscaped campus of some 210 lush and restored acres, located directly between nearby Houston and Austin. The Festival-Institute and its year-round operations moved to this site in the Bicentennial summer of 1976. The first historic structure moved to Festival Hill came from La Grange and was named the William Lockhart Clayton House at its new site. Built in 1885, it was renovated in 1976 for faculty, offices, teaching, and indoor concerts. It features some of the most commanding woodwork on Festival Hill, surpassed only by the acoustically-acclaimed Festival Concert Hall. The Menke House, built in 1902, was moved to Festival Hill from Hempstead and renovated as a faculty and conference center in 1979. It houses the furnishings and collections of the late Texas composer David Guion , and its Gothic Revival ceilings and staircases make it a showcase of Texas carpentry. The historic sanctuary of the former Travis Street United Methodist Church of La Grange, built in 1883, was moved to Festival Hill in 1994, for restoration as a center for chamber music, organ recitals, lectures, and seminars. The Festival-Institute Museum and Library exhibits its art collections in the Festival Concert Hall and the restored historic houses. The Central Library includes the largest collection of valuable guidebooks to English country homes in the world. The David W. Guion Archives and the Americana Collection, as well as the Anders and Josephine Oxehufwud Swedish and European Collection, have unique hand-crafted galleries in the Festival Concert Hall. Other facilities have been built to house accommodations as well as provide practice, teaching, meeting, and seminar rooms for the festival and for year-round programs and conferences. Long-term construction on the Festival Concert Hall was completed in 2007. The two concerts in 1971 have grown into more than thirty programs during June and July of each year. The August to April Concerts and other programs presented each season at Festival Hill bring the total number of year-round concerts to more than fifty. These include orchestral, chamber music, choral, vocal, brass, and solo performances. The repertoire extends from Baroque to co

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Ledbetter, Hazel Gawley

1959

Hazel Gawley Ledbetter, daughter of Julian Hawkins and Irene (Harbuck) Gawley, was born in Houston, Texas, on September 25, 1902. She was educated in the public schools of Houston and at the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Woman's University) in Denton. She married Dr. Paul Veal Ledbetter, grandson of Dr. A. A. Ledbetter , on June 10, 1924. They were the parents of three children. She was active in civic affairs as an early member of River Oaks Garden Club and as president of the Women's Committee of the Houston Symphony Orchestra . During World War II she was in charge of the Camp and Hospital program at Camp Swift . As a longtime friend of Ima Hogg , she participated in the preparation of Bayou Bend and its collection to become a part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . Her interest in architecture and restoration led her to Round Top in 1959. She purchased several farms, houses, and old buildings and began a significant restoration program. In 1961 she purchased the property that is now known as the Winedale Historical Center . She offered the original stagecoach inn structure to the Museum of Fine Arts. When it could not be moved to Bayou Bend she sold the entire property to Ima Hogg who gave it to the University of Texas at Austin. In the late 1960s she sold all her remaining Round Top properties to Charles L. Bybee and his wife Faith. She died in Houston on October 6, 1992, and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery. In 1993 she was awarded, posthumously, the Ima Hogg Award in recognition of her work at Round Top.

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Round Top

1835

On the Old San Felipe Trail, in memory of John C. Robison, participant of the Battle of Velasco; Joel W. Robison, McHenry Winburn, Isaac Lafayette Hill, Spencer Burton Townsend, Stephen Townsend, Veterans of San Jacinto; J. T. Townsend, John P. Townsend of the San Jacinto Campaign; Mayers Fisher Jones of the Santa Fe and Snively Expeditions; John Rufus Alexander of the Mier Expedition, and other Pioneers who resided in the vicinity.

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Round Top, Texas

Music in Round Top

Songs About Round Top

Artists From Round Top

Rivers & Roads in Song near Round Top

History of Round Top

The World's Biggest Treasure Hunt RoadyGoat

A Concert Hall in a Cow Pasture RoadyGoat

Engineering Perfect Sound RoadyGoat

Round Top Community

Wandke House

Hill, Isaac Lafayette

International Festival-Institute At Round Top

Ledbetter, Hazel Gawley

Round Top

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