When Martha Huber packed up her retail space in Mitchell and moved her business to a ten-acre parcel outside Ethan, she didn't know if her customers would make the drive. "I knew it was the right move for us," she said of the decision, "but I didn't know if people would follow us out here." Now in its fifth year at that rural site, the answer is written into the calendar itself: four shows a year, nine days each, and hundreds of people finding their way down a country road to do business that, on paper, shouldn't need a country road at all.
Most retail tries to be available. Rustic Designs and More does the opposite. The barn stays closed for most of the year and opens in short, scheduled bursts, spring, summer, fall, and Christmas, nine days at a stretch. Add it up and the doors are open roughly 36 days out of 365. In a town of 365 people, that math looks backward until you watch how it actually works.
A Business Built on Scarcity, Not Convenience
A year-round storefront competes on foot traffic. A nine-day show competes on timing, and timing is something people plan around rather than stumble into. The 2026 Spring Country Show ran May 2 through May 10, deliberately closing on Mother's Day, a detail Huber says has become part of the tradition rather than a coincidence. The Summer Show followed in July, running July 18 through July 26. Vendors and shoppers who know the pattern build it into their own calendars the same way they'd plan around a county fair or a hunting season, not the way they'd plan a trip to a shop that's simply always there.
That scarcity does something a permanent storefront can't. It turns a rural location into a destination instead of an inconvenience. Nobody drives past this barn on the way to somewhere else. They drive to it on purpose, on one of 36 specific days, because they know it won't be there tomorrow.
The Customer Base Came With Them
The other piece of the math is less about the calendar and more about the decades before it. Huber has spent 35 years in the business, and before the barn outside Ethan existed, that business traveled. What started with a folding table and a handful of handmade pillows grew across three decades of shows, where Huber and her partner, Bob Brenner, met many of the vendors who now fill the barn each season. When they settled into the rural property, they weren't building a customer base from nothing. They were consolidating one that already existed, built show by show, state by state, over years on the road.
That's why a business only five years into this specific address can already pull vendors from South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa, with customers who first found Huber's work on the traveling circuit still making the trip from out of state to see it. The move to the countryside wasn't the start of the relationship. It was where a long-running relationship finally got a permanent address.
What's Actually Inside the Barn
The building itself is the original structure on the property, a red barn Huber and Brenner converted rather than replaced, preserving much of its original wood and features during the renovation. Its windows now display animal photography shot by Huber's daughter, Nicole Heitzman, giving the space a farm-inspired feel before a visitor even steps inside.
Brenner brings his own layer to the property: a decades-long personal collection of more than 200 well pumps, wagon wheels, and windmill parts spread across the grounds. Some pieces stay as found. Others get reworked into metal yard art, welded and shaped using the ironwork skills Brenner has practiced alongside Huber for more than 20 years. Dozens of those wagon wheels now line the property in a display Huber describes as intentionally museum-like, encouraging people to slow down rather than shop in a hurry.
"We tell people, just walk around and explore. There's something everywhere you look."
The property's best-known landmark, though, is stranger than antique iron. A large dinosaur statue, hauled back from the South on a trailer with its head sticking out, now sits among the metal yard art as an unofficial mascot. "The kids go straight to it," Huber said. "They love that thing."
The Family Business Inside the Family Business
Heitzman's own path traces the shop's broader story. She started as a kid painting faces at her mother's shows and eventually earned a degree in art, building a career around wildlife and outdoor-themed work that now includes paintings, photography, canvas prints, metal prints, and laser-etched designs sold throughout the barn and property. What began as something to keep a child occupied at a craft fair became one of the draws people specifically come back for, alongside the Facebook page shoppers know as Rustic Design and More by Martha's Crafts and Wildman Metals, a name that folds three generations of the same family's handiwork into one listing.
The off-season isn't downtime either. After the Christmas show wraps, the family spends winter rebuilding inventory and reshaping the property for spring, which is part of why each show feels different from the last rather than a rerun of the same tables and shelves.
What It Says About Ethan
Ethan is a town of 365 people as of the 2020 census, laid out in 1883 and named for Revolutionary War patriot Ethan Allen, sitting ten miles south of Mitchell. A town that size doesn't have room for anonymous retail. It has room for the things people actually build relationships around: the school's football and basketball games, the historical society's events, and, for one long weekend four times a year, a red barn on 264th Street where a dinosaur statue watches over dozens of antique wagon wheels.
That's the real reason the math works. A store open every day of the year competes with every other store open every day of the year. A store open nine specific days becomes something people mark down, tell their neighbors about, and plan a Saturday around. In a town this size, that's not a marketing strategy. It's just how small places decide what belongs on the calendar.
If you're weighing what life actually looks like in a place like Ethan, the shows, the seasons, the businesses that make a town of 365 feel like somewhere worth knowing, that's the kind of local detail worth asking about before you ever look at a listing. Mitchell Realty LLC has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of rhythm across Mitchell, Ethan, Mt. Vernon, Parkston, and Alexandria. Contact a Local Expert when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening in the towns you're considering, not just what the map shows.
