A Round Top original
Antiques dealer Nancy Krause has been a fixture for 50 years
Fifty years ago, Nancy Krause and some 25 other antiques dealers hauled their best furniture and collectibles into the Rifle Hall in Round Top for Emma Lee Turney’s first antiques show.
Plenty of customers had driven in from Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, but no one could have anticipated how that little show would grow into a massive event that draws thousands of people to the towns along Texas 237 for weeks on end. Though the area’s smaller shows have already opened, the Original Round Top Antiques Fair — the one that started it all — gets underway Monday and runs through Saturday. Krause is the only vendor to work the show from the beginning. “It was exciting,” she said. “Miss Ima Hogg was there, and she was a big mover and shaker. Hazel Ledbetter, too. … And Faith Bybee was there.”
If Texas had royalty, it would be those three influential women, who were good friends and better competitors. They would vie for prize pieces made with the German craftsmanship Texas furniture makers were known for. And selling to Miss Ima was the prize.
“Word would drift through that Miss Ima was in the building, and everybody would snap to,” Krause said. “She was a shopper, and she bought at the show. To say that you sold to her was thrilling.”
Turney retired in 2008, but her event has its own home, the Big Red Barn, along with an annex and Continental Tent where dealers largely sell Americana and Texana. Down the street is a younger event, the Marburger Farm Antique Show, marking its 20th anniversary this year, where vendors also sell European antiques.
Shoppers and designers will prowl Round Top, Carmine, Warrenton, Fayetteville, LaGrange and Ledbetter looking for one-of-a-kind vintage and antique pieces. Some will find heavy pine, oak or walnut tables or cupboards; others will be satisfied with collectibles they can carry — flow blue pottery, wooden bowls or crystal.
They’ll place their treasure strategically in the home, and when a visitor notices it, they’ll offer this unique bragging point: “I got it at Round Top.”
Changing market
Krause, a Houston native, and her husband, Milton, were teachers in Navasota when they followed their superintendent to a new post in Brenham ISD in 1961. When her husband was promoted to principal, she decided it was time to find another profession — one where her husband would not be her boss.
A friend introduced her to the world of antiques, and she was hooked, opening her business, Nancy’s Antiques, in 1965.
“I was fortunate that I could sell, turn around and reinvest. My husband used to say, ‘The wheels on the car won’t roll fast enough when you make a sale,’ ” said Krause, who’s 81 but hasn’t slowed down a bit.
Nancy’s Antiques now spreads through a compound of four buildings that revolve around her home, but you won’t find it while strolling through the city’s downtown. It’s in a neighborhood with on-street parking, drawing people who are more likely to be collectors than browsers, she said.
The market for American antiques has changed dramatically since its 1980s and ’90s heyday, but good furniture still draws a crowd, and pieces such as cobalt pottery or wooden pantry boxes and butter molds are still highly collectible.
Lonn Taylor, a historian who began his career as a curator at Winedale and retired from a post at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, said the story of Texas’s decorative arts is more than furniture and accessories. It’s about resources, immigration and progress.
In the middle of the 19th century, every town had a cabinetmaker who sold his wares to neighbors. A few decades later, the railroad changed all of that, making mass-produced factory furniture accessible elsewhere.
But by the middle of the 20th century, wealthy families in bigger cities such as Houston started buying small farms and ranches around Round Top and moving and restoring historical homes to them. Those structures called for period furniture, so, like Hogg, Ledbetter and Bybee, people wanted those old farm tables and jelly cupboards that represented the broader settling of Texas.
Among the many German immigrants who settled in Central Texas in the 1800s, many were skilled artisans who built furniture in the “biedermeier” style for the middle class, Taylor said.
“They made some absolutely beautiful furniture,” Taylor said, noting that they often used walnut rather than pine. “Those were the pieces Miss Hogg and Miss Bybee and collectors recognized as superior and were anxious to acquire. That’s what Winedale was furnished with.”
Simply put, the furniture tells the story of where we came from.
“Look at the furniture and how beautiful it is and how much care and work is there,” added Ben Wright, associate director of communications at the University of Texas’s Briscoe Center. “This is pre-oil-boom Texas, when Texas was still a hardscrabble place. Yet people took care to decorate their houses through beautiful furniture or artwork, homes with painted beams and ceilings. The beauty was important to people who led hard lives.”
Though you’ll find much more than that kind of furniture at Round Top, the show’s popularity does serve to preserve a sense of history and appreciation for a time when everything was made by hand.
In her store, Krause shows off her newest find for collectors of primitives, shelves of American pottery she bought from an estate. The pieces are from the East Coast and Midwest, marked with the names of companies — Cowen, Norton — that made them or the states they were in — Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio. Those stamped with cobalt birds and other emblems are the most prized.
Another table is covered in “treenware” — smaller wooden household items such as bowls. There are “firkins,” too, wooden pantry boxes that once held sugar or flour and come in various sizes and colors.
Smaller price tags are found on butter molds, once common household items when people made their own butter and finished it with a decorative stamp.
A preservationist
Krause’s reach into the past isn’t just for home furnishings. Her home and one shop building were moved to their current site and restored.
The family that founded the Schleider Furniture store once lived on the site, and they had a small dairy barn at the front of the property that provided milk and extra income during the Great Depression.
A blue house fronted with gingerbread — Krause calls it the “doll house” — was moved from elsewhere in town. Developers wanted to buy the land, and the Krauses couldn’t stand to see the sweet home torn down.
In the back, there’s a red, barnlike structure that Krause had built; she needed something with big movable doors to get bigger pieces of furniture in and out.
Her own home is stuffed with antiques, and it’s not uncommon for Krause to take a customer through if he or she is looking for something specific that she has. Everything’s for sale.
This home also once had a life elsewhere. Back in the 1980s, Krause learned it was for sale and approached her husband.
“He said, ‘You have got to realize that you are not Miss Ima Hogg. You’ve got to quit buying these houses,’ ” she said, laughing. “I pouted for about a week, and my husband said, ‘OK, let’s go buy that house.’ ”
It cost $5,000 and took a year to move because they had to take it in parts when the weather cooperated.
Interior walls were removed to make smaller spaces into one larger, more usable space. Cabinet shelves are filled with the pottery she loves to collect, and her made-in-Brenham cedar pie safe still has original punch-tin fronts.
Krause has sketched out plans for her booth at the antiques show, and she knows where every piece will sit and what each shelf will hold. Whatever she sells will be replaced with something else the next day. It’s a big job to set it up and keep it stocked.
“I’ve worn out one husband, one son and six grandsons, so now I have to hire a moving company,” she said.