The Silos: When a TV Show Rebuilt a City
Near Waco, Texas
The two silos on Webster Avenue are one hundred and twenty feet tall, built in nineteen fifty by the Brazos Valley Cotton Oil Company to store grain. They stopped being used for storage in the nineteen nineties and sat empty for years, a pair of concrete cylinders in a declining section of downtown that the rest of Waco had largely stopped thinking about. Then Chip and Joanna Gaines bought the property in twenty fourteen and opened Magnolia Market at the Silos in October of twenty fifteen.
Their renovation television series, Fixer Upper, had been running on HGTV since twenty thirteen and had built a national audience of people who wanted to watch houses in central Texas get transformed. Waco was the show's setting, and viewers started showing up to see it for themselves. By November of twenty sixteen, thirteen months after the market opened, one point two million people had visited.
The Dr Pepper Museum, a few blocks away, reported a sixty percent increase in attendance in the same period. Hotels in Waco filled on weekends. Restaurants opened.
Reporters credited the show with an increase in tourism and economic development in Waco. What the Magnolia story illustrates is how quickly a single successful business can reframe a city's identity when the timing is right. Waco had been known primarily for the Branch Davidian siege, for the nineteen fifty-three tornado, and for things that happened there that the city would rather not be defined by.
A television show about home renovation changed that narrative in ways that decades of civic promotion had failed to do.
