The Fair
Granbury, Hood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Erected 1888 by Andy Aston for a harness and saddle-making shop. Ironwork was added during a 1906 remodeling, while George Landers was part owner. After harness shop was relocated about 1908, various retail stores operated here, including the grocery of Joe Kerr and several drygoods firms. Notable were "The Fair" and the store of "Blue-Front Riley", a merchant nicknamed for the facade of his earlier store, on the west side of the square.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Andy Aston built this Granbury square building in 1888 as a harness and saddle-making shop, and decorative ironwork was added during a 1906 remodeling while George Landers held a share of the business. After the harness trade moved out around 1908, a parade of retailers filled the space—Joe Kerr's grocery, several dry-goods firms, and the store that gave the building its name, "The Fair." Among the neighboring merchants was one nicknamed "Blue-Front Riley" for the painted facade of his earlier shop.
Why it matters
The building embodies the everyday commercial life of a Texas courthouse-square town, where a single storefront could shift from horse tack to groceries as the community's needs changed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the late 1880s, the Texas courthouse square was the beating heart of a county town. Granbury, the seat of Hood County, had grown up around its limestone courthouse, and the storefronts that ringed it formed a kind of downtown before anyone used the word. This was the Gilded Age on the Texas frontier: railroads were stitching small towns into national markets, and a brick-or-stone commercial block was a statement that a place meant to last.
In 1888, the year this building went up, the horse was still the engine of everything. Farmers needed harness; riders needed saddles; freight and buggies alike depended on well-made leather rigging. A harness-and-saddle shop wasn't a quaint specialty—it was as essential to daily life as a gas station would later become. Locating one right on the square put it where the wagons already gathered on court days and market days.
The building's later life traces the same arc every square-side storefront in America was living through. The ornamental ironwork added in 1906 reflected a moment of confidence and Victorian taste in commercial architecture. And when the harness trade moved out around 1908, that timing is no accident: the automobile was beginning its long displacement of the horse, and the businesses that survived were the ones that could change what they sold.
People & events
The story begins with Andy Aston, who put up the building in 1888 for his harness and saddle-making trade. In an era when a craftsman's name and a good storefront were nearly the same asset, Aston's shop was both workshop and showroom, turning out the leather goods a farming county ran on.
By the 1906 remodeling, George Landers had come in as a part owner—the point at which the decorative ironwork was added and the plain working shop took on a more finished, prosperous face. A remodel like that usually marks a business at its peak, investing profits back into its own front.
After the harness shop relocated around 1908, the space became a stage that different merchants stepped onto in turn. Joe Kerr ran his grocery here; several dry-goods firms came and went; and the store called "The Fair"—the name the building still carries—did business within these walls. Nearby stood a merchant remembered only by his nickname, "Blue-Front Riley," so called for the painted facade of an earlier store he'd kept on the west side of the square. It's a small, human detail that tells you how these towns worked: a man could become known county-wide by the color of his storefront.
Its place in the American story
This one modest building holds a pattern that repeated in thousands of American county-seat towns. The square was the country's original mixed-use main street, and a single storefront was expected to serve whatever the community needed at that moment—first leatherwork, then groceries, then dry goods—rather than being torn down and rebuilt each time the market shifted.
It also captures a great national hinge. A shop that opened selling harness and saddles in 1888 and had moved that trade out by around 1908 sits exactly on the line where horse-powered America began giving way to the machine age. You can read the coming of the automobile not in some grand monument but in the quiet fact that the leather-goods maker gave up his prime corner to a grocer.
And the naming of "Blue-Front Riley" preserves something historians treasure but rarely find written down: how ordinary people identified one another and their businesses in a face-to-face economy, before brands and signage as we know them. The square remembered him by a color, and the marker remembers him still.
If you visit
Stand back and take in the storefront the way a shopper on court day would have. Look up: the ironwork added in the 1906 remodeling is the detail to find, the flourish a prospering business added to its own face. On many square-side buildings this kind of decorative metal survives above the modern shopfront, so let your eye travel to the upper floor.
Then walk the rest of the Granbury square and let the whole ensemble do its work. This is one of Texas's best-preserved historic courthouse squares, and the pleasure is less any single building than the way the blocks frame the courthouse and each other. Picture the same corner cycling through harness maker, grocer, and dry-goods store while the wagons—and later the automobiles—came and went out front.
It makes an easy stop on a Hill Country or North Central Texas road trip: a place to slow down, walk a lap of the square, and imagine the parade of merchants who each, in turn, called this corner their own.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Andy Aston
- · George Landers
- · Joe Kerr
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Aston-Landers Building
Granbury, TX
Andy Aston and George Landers erected this native-stone building with a patented iron front as a saloon in 1893, and it saw its share of frontier drama, including a 1901 duel that wounded a bystander on the square. When temperance crusader Carrie Nation visited Granbury in 1905, sentiment was shifting, and voters outlawed liquor the next year. Aston then turned the space into a buggy and harness shop staffed by skilled leather craftsmen, and it later held many other businesses.
J.F. and J. Nutt Building
Granbury, TX
Blind brothers Jesse and Jacob Nutt helped establish Granbury as the Hood County seat, opening their first store in 1866 in a tiny log house with a wagon yard behind it. In 1893 a local contractor raised this sturdy building of hand-hewn Hood County stone, and around 1919 it became the Nutt Hotel, celebrated for its dining room. Three generations of the Nutt family occupied the landmark.
Glenn Brothers Building
Granbury, TX
Attorney and town builder James Farr raised this store in 1885, and by 1888 it belonged to the four Glenn brothers, civic leaders who ran the family grocery here. After an 1891 fire swept the block, contractors rebuilt with heavy iron-clad timbers supporting a handsome Victorian brick front—an example of the sturdy commercial architecture that lined a booming Texas courthouse square.
Hardware and Tin Shop
Granbury, TX
As Granbury's courthouse square filled in during the 1870s and 1880s, wood gave way to stone quarried nearby. Built in 1882 and rebuilt after an 1891 fire, this building passed from investor to saloonkeepers to, by 1895, a hardware and tin shop run by a former county clerk. Upstairs worked Lon Morris, a lawyer remembered as a benefactor of the college that bears his name.