Park along Avenue F on a Saturday evening and you may have to circle the block twice. Two years ago that block held a scattering of empty storefronts and not much reason to linger past five o'clock. The city's own downtown planners flagged the problem directly: the Lawson buildings alone represented more than 50,000 square feet sitting vacant in the middle of town, according to Freese and Nichols, the planning firm that helped write Midlothian's Downtown Master Plan. That plan is the reason the same firm can now say every storefront downtown is occupied.
What changed is not one project. It is two separate ones, built by different people with different money, that happened to land on the same two blocks at the same time.
Where the Old Houses Went
Founders Row started as a private obsession before it was a business plan. Stephen Hildebaugh bought his first old home across the street from the current site back in 1997, and it took until 2016 for him and business partner Logan Gaddis to start actually moving relocated nineteenth-century houses onto the lots they had spent years piecing together. The result sits at 314 East Avenue F now, a run of restored homes from Midlothian's founding era repurposed as restaurants and shops.
Wilson's Seafood & Grill occupies one of the more unusual buildings in the row: a restored 1890 church, moved to the site from Italy, Texas, with the original high ceilings and church pews still doing duty as seating. Next door, The Porch Pour serves as the farm-to-table restaurant and wine bar anchoring the other end of the block. Between the two, the row fills out with Relic + Root for home decor, Copper Rose for women's clothing, and House of Aesthetics for spa services, with SOCO Coffee House a short walk over on Avenue G.
None of this required a highway exit or a shopping center parking lot. It required someone willing to spend years collecting old houses one lot at a time.
A Different Kind of Investment Two Doors Down
As Focus Daily News reported, the Lawson Development District took a more conventional path to the same block. Bearded Ax Brewery went in as the anchor tenant, a full brewery and restaurant that construction crews targeted for a late-2024 opening. A few storefronts over, El Primo's Mexican Grill & Cantina broke ground in what used to be an abandoned 17,000-square-foot warehouse, with plans to seat up to 700 people and four one-bedroom lofts tucked into the back of the building. The project's owner, Todd Tonore, already runs the original El Primo's in Mansfield and sits on that city's council. He picked Midlothian for the second location, and the build has not been simple: a mid-project change to the city's parking requirements forced a full redesign of the building's plans before construction could continue.
The public side of the ledger tells a similar story. Midlothian Economic Development put $3 million toward a new combined city hall and library a few blocks away, funded in part by a bond package voters approved in 2021. That project freed up the old city hall site, which the city has since turned into an expanded Heritage Park at 234 North 8th Street, now serving as the literal center of downtown events.
Two different kinds of money bet on the same two blocks: one person's years-long restoration project, and a set of public incentives designed specifically to fix a vacancy problem the city had already diagnosed.
How You Know It Actually Worked
The festival's expanded run and reported attendance offer a clearer sign of its growth.
MidloFest, the Chamber of Commerce's signature festival, moved to Heritage Park for its April 25, 2026 date and drew an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 attendees over its expanded seven-hour run, according to the Midlothian Chamber of Commerce. The event grew out of what used to be a smaller wine and arts festival. What stands out is the logistics note the Chamber had to add this year: parking downtown would be limited because of ongoing construction, and attendees were told to park instead at Frank Seale Middle School or Walmart and take a shuttle in.
The event also shows how downtown can serve as a gathering place, not just a place to shop or dine.
Not the Only Growth in Town
None of this means the highway corridor on the other side of town went quiet. Main Street Towne Crossing, out along Highway 67, has been building at its own pace, with Lowe's opening as the anchor tenant in 2025 and a Chick-fil-A that broke ground on the same site. Mo' Bettahs Hawaiian Style Food opened its first Midlothian location there on June 26, 2026, bringing Hawaiian plate lunches to a stretch of town that already reads as classic exurban retail growth: big parking lots, national chains, easy highway access.
That kind of growth is common in fast-growing towns south of Dallas. What is less common is a historic downtown pulling its own weight at the same time instead of losing customers to the same highway strip. Midlothian is doing both, through two different mechanisms that were never designed to compete with each other. The Towne Crossing corridor is drawing national chains to a high-traffic commercial site. The two blocks around Main Street and Avenue F are doing something a shopping center cannot: letting you walk from a seafood dinner in a relocated church to a beer at Bearded Ax to a coffee at SOCO without moving your car once.
For anyone who already lives in Midlothian, that distinction matters more than another new restaurant opening. It's the difference between a town where the interesting stuff requires a drive and one where two of its blocks now hold enough reasons to park once and stay.
If you're the kind of person who wants to know what's opening before it shows up on a map app, that's exactly the kind of local detail we track at Bear Creek Realty. Contact us anytime you want the current read on what's changing around Midlothian and the towns nearby.
