The Texas Renaissance Festival opens for its 52nd season on October 10, and for the first time since 1974, the person who built it from a played-out strip mine into the largest Renaissance fair in the country won't be the one running it. George Coulam, known around Todd Mission as "King George," died by suicide at his home on May 21, 2025, just two weeks after a Grimes County judge ordered him to sell the festival he'd owned for half a century. If you live in or around Montgomery, that story has probably already crossed your feed. What hasn't gotten nearly as much attention is the thing that actually determines whether your Saturday at the fair starts with turkey legs or with forty-five minutes of brake lights on FM 1774, and that problem predates the sale by years.
Here's the shape of it: a corporate ownership change closed out a genuinely messy legal fight this year, but the bottleneck that snarls traffic every fall hasn't moved an inch, and it was never really about who signs the checks.
What Actually Changed This Year
The short version of the ownership saga: Coulam agreed in 2023 to sell the festival and its surrounding land to real estate investor Meril Rivard for $60 million, then tried to back out. Rivard's group sued, the civil case dragged through Grimes County's 506th state District Court, and in May 2025 Judge Gary W. Chaney ruled against Coulam, ordering the sale to proceed and assessing him roughly $22 million in damages plus attorney's fees for breach of contract. Coulam died weeks later. By August 2025, a final judgment confirmed Rivard's purchase through a set of corporate entities, and this year's festival is the first full season operating under that new ownership.
Attorney Anthony LaPorte, who represented Rivard through the litigation, told reporters early on that the deal was structured corporately enough that the transition should move forward without much disruption on the ground. That's largely held up. The festival's publicist has framed the 2025 season, the last one before the sale fully closed, as proof that attendance and the guest experience were staying on track regardless of the courtroom drama. This year's theme, "Magic and Memories," and the eight themed weekends locals expect each fall (Oktoberfest, 1001 Dreams, Pirate's Adventure, All Hallow's Eve, Heroes and Villains, Barbarian Invasion, Highland Fling, and Celtic Christmas) are all back in their usual order.
What Didn't Change: The Drive
Here's where the real story is for anyone who's made this trip more than once. Back in October 2022, when TxDOT finished extending State Highway 249 into Grimes County, the festival's own marketing director framed it as a game changer for Houston-area visitors. Carl Foy told reporters at the time that with the extension and a widened FM 1774, you could get "from Beltway 8 to the 16th century in about half an hour."
That was the pitch three years ago. It hasn't matched what's actually happening at the gate. In November 2025, Chronicle reporters covering a weekend at the festival described visitors stuck in gridlock so bad that TikTok users were filming the backup, and the culprit wasn't the highway itself. It was the single intersection where SH 249 meets FM 1774, just north of the festival entrance, controlled by what a source told the paper was a blinking red light that functions more like a stop sign than a real intersection built for that kind of volume.
That detail matters because it means the millions spent extending 249 solved a different problem than the one that actually slows people down every October. The highway got you close fast. The last few hundred yards are still bottlenecked by a signal that was never upgraded to handle festival-weekend traffic, ownership change or not.
The Route Locals Actually Use
The festival's own guidance, which hasn't changed in years, is to avoid coming up from the south through Magnolia on 249 when volume is heavy, and instead approach from the north:
- From I-45 northbound: exit at SH 105 West in Conroe, follow it to FM 1774 in Plantersville, then head south to the festival gates.
- From SH 290: exit at SH 6 West toward Bryan/College Station, then SH 105 East toward Plantersville, then south on FM 1774.
- From the south on 249: expect the FM 1774 signal to be the choke point regardless of how light traffic looks on the highway itself.
None of this is new information if you've lived here a while, but it's worth restating precisely because the "closer than ever" marketing message from 2022 can lull people into skipping the northern route and paying for it in a two-hour line, which is exactly what the Chronicle described happening last November. A single themed weekend at this festival can pull well over 50,000 visitors through the gate in one day, and that volume is still funneling through the same blinking light.
The Season, in Practical Terms
If you're planning around this year's calendar, the confirmed dates are straightforward: the festival runs Saturdays and Sundays from October 10 through November 29, plus the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 27. Beyond the dates, a few logistics are worth knowing before you buy:
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Ticket policy | Date-specific, non-refundable; a $5 exchange-insurance add-on lets you swap your date before entry |
| General parking | Free with admission |
| Preferred parking | $25 |
| Valet | $40, available online or at the gate until 4 p.m. or capacity |
| Gate hours | 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on open days |
Peak arrival has historically fallen between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., which lines up with when the FM 1774 signal gets overwhelmed. Arriving earlier or planning to arrive after the midday rush tends to matter more than which highway you take to get there.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You're Already Here
Coulam's death and the court-ordered sale made national headlines partly because HBO had already turned his succession fight into a documentary series that aired in June 2024, and partly because a self-made mayor losing his town's signature event in a lawsuit is a good story. But if you live in Montgomery or along Lake Conroe, the festival isn't really a story about a courtroom in Grimes County. It's a weekend you've probably done a dozen times, and the thing you actually need to know each fall isn't who owns the gate, it's which road gets you through it.
That's the pattern worth sitting with: infrastructure money and ownership drama both get covered as if they're the whole story, but the friction point that decides your afternoon is usually smaller, older, and easier to miss than either one. It's a blinking light that was never built for the crowd it now has to handle, no matter who's cashing the ticket revenue on the other side of it.
If you're weighing whether Montgomery's mix of small-town rhythm and easy access to regional traditions like this one fits the next stage of your life, that's exactly the kind of local detail worth talking through. Jenny Hill has spent nearly two decades helping people move into and around Northwest Houston, and a conversation about the neighborhoods, the seasons, and the roads that connect them is a good place to start.
