🏆 Chamber Staff Walked Into Her Office to Tell Her She Had Won

🧵 Vineyard Silk and Appleton’s Wool Now Have a Home in Spring

🍽️ Fourteen Downtown Conroe Restaurants, One Room, One Night

🎹 The Ragtime Players Come Back to Conroe for a Seventh Time

🌤️ Partly cloudy with patchy fog · 99°F / 77°F

Humidity to 92%, wind to 9 mph, rain chance 0%.

Patchy fog early, then a hot one. Not quite triple digits, which counts as mercy in August.

Source: Vaisala Xweather

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Josie Lewis did not go to a ceremony to find out. Chamber staff turned up at her office and told her there, that she is The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 Emerging Leader of the Year.

The award goes to a professional building a career, contributing something new inside their organization, and standing out as a rising leader in the community. The Chamber describes recipients as people who look for ways to challenge themselves and pull others along with them.

Most of the case for Lewis sits in one program. She serves as Team Lead for CREW, Connecting Rising Executives in The Woodlands, the Chamber’s group for young professionals. CREW is in its first year, and the Chamber credits her with a central role in building its momentum, widening participation, and making room for younger people to get involved in the business community here.

“Josie has given an extraordinary amount of her time, talent and energy to the Chamber over the past year, particularly through her leadership of CREW,” said Aaron Cox, President and CEO of The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce. He added that she has helped turn a new initiative into a growing community where young professionals feel welcomed and encouraged to lead.

Her day job is selling this place. As Director of Sales for Visit The Woodlands, she works to bring conventions, meetings and group business here, setting sales strategy and working alongside local hospitality people to make the town a destination. She holds the Certified Meeting Professional and Certified Tourism Ambassador designations, and has been recognized by the Texas Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus and named to Connect Corporate’s 40 Under 40. She will be honored with the other award recipients at the Chamber’s Annual Meeting and Awards Luncheon on Friday, September 25 at the Kevin Brady Community Center.

Why it matters: the person whose job is convincing outsiders this is a good place just got told by the people who live here that she is one of them.

Source/Credits: Woodlands Online

Studio 3113 Modern Needlework opened August 1, and it is the kind of shop you either walk past or drive across town for. Owner Beth Griffith stocks canvases, thread and supplies for stitchers.

The thread wall is the tell. Vineyard Silk, Milan, Appleton’s Wool, Au Ver a Soie, Painter’s Threads, Moondrake and Rainbow Gallery are all on the shelves. Griffith also plans to run classes and community gatherings at the store, which is the part that turns a supply run into a standing appointment.

You will find it at 1776 Woodstead Court, Suite 123, in Spring.

Why it matters: a needlepoint shop is a room where people sit down next to each other and stay a while, and there are not many of those left.

Source/Credits: Community Impact

The Downtown Conroe Association is putting fourteen of its restaurants under one roof on Tuesday, September 15, from 5 to 9 p.m. at Timberline Crossing, 109 Metcalf St. It is called Taste of Downtown Conroe and it has not happened before.

The list runs Dragon Bowl C, Carmelita’s, Gabino’s Wood Fired Pizza Co., GuadalaHARRY’s Bar and Grill, Aunt Jessie’s Kitchen and Catering at Lucy Blues, The Crawfish Critic and Seafood Co., The Table at Madeley, Paulette Café, Timberline Crossing, Lil Roux, Casa Umami, The Red Brick Tavern, Pacific Yard House and EFrees on Main.

One of the people behind it has watched the district fill in from the ground up. San Cheng, who owns Dragon Bowl C and Casa Umami and sits on the DCA board, says that before he opened either place he worked to create openings for food trucks and pushed for the street closures that helped turn downtown into somewhere people go on purpose.

Meals on Wheels will be there sampling a new catering menu, and the Montgomery County Food Bank will be collecting donations and signing up volunteers. DCA president Jason Franklin says the hope is that the first one becomes an annual one.

Why it matters: fourteen kitchens agreeing to cook in the same room on the same night is a fair measure of whether a downtown is actually working.

Source/Credits: Woodlands Online

The Conroe Symphony Orchestra is bringing ragtime back on Saturday, August 22, from 1:30 to 5 p.m. at the Conroe Symphony Centre, 1500 North Frazier. It is free, and you can stay the whole afternoon or drop in for twenty minutes.

Organizer Bill Thompson calls it the seventh installment of a somewhat-annual tradition, which is about the most honest description of a recurring event anyone has ever given. Members of the San Antonio Ragtime Society are driving up for it: Monty Suffern, Brooks Christensen, Will Partridge, Steuart Dewar and Belinda Huber, playing “Texas Fox Trot,” “The Thriller,” “Tiger Rag” and “Red Peppers.”

Local players get the other half. Stephanie Harris, the orchestra’s principal flutist, leads Flute Rhapsody through “Great Scott Rag” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Conroe piano teacher Alecia Russell joins Thompson for a duet, and Abby Jo Jackson takes “Dill Pickles” and “The Entertainer.”

Light refreshments, and a preview of the orchestra’s 2026-2027 season along the way.

Why it matters: four free hours of live piano on a Saturday afternoon is a hard thing to find anywhere, let alone twenty minutes up the road.

Source/Credits: Hello Woodlands

🏆 Forty-eight people just started a nine-month leadership program together : The Leadership Montgomery County Signature Class of 2027 reads like a map of who runs things around here, with people from The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce, The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, the Montgomery County Food Bank, Interfaith of The Woodlands, Conroe ISD and the Oak Ridge North Police Department all in the same room. Read more in Hello Woodlands

🎓 A recent iSchool High graduate won a Teamsters scholarship : Emma Salayon, daughter of Teamsters Local 19 member Joseph Salayon, took one of 600 $2,000 awards the fund gives out each year and heads to Sam Houston State this fall. Read more in Woodlands Online

🤝 Interfaith is collecting school supplies again : The Kits 4 Kids program reaches more than 2,000 South Montgomery County students a year, and the most-requested items are fun-themed backpacks, markers, crayons and notebooks. Read more in Community Impact

🌱 The Township is teaching people to spot invasive species : A free four-hour workshop on August 15 at The Woodlands Emergency Training Center, led by Ashley Morgan-Olvera of the Texas Invasive Species Institute at Sam Houston State, with registration required and seating limited. Read more in The Woodlands Township

🗓️ Rock the Block, Free Musical Summer Send-Off | Market Street | Free | More info

🗓️ Boogie Bash In August | 11:00 AM | More info

🗓️ Canon Beginner Class | Precision Camera and Video, 17937 I-45 North, Shenandoah | More info

🗓️ Workshop Wednesday, Summer Send-Off DIY Day | Magnolia Ritual Texas Apothecary, 6318 FM 1488 Suite 110, Magnolia | 1:00 to 5:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Shadow Puppet Theatre, Amelia Bedelia’s First Day of School | 11:00 AM | More info

🗓️ Rock the Row | Hughes Landing, 1900 Hughes Landing Boulevard | 7:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Movie on the Lawn, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie | The Lawn at The Woodlands Mall | 7:00 PM | Free | More info

🗓️ John Mellencamp, Dancing Words Tour | The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion | 8:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Parent’s Night Out, Game Night | 4:00 PM | More info

🗓️ TOTO with Christopher Cross and The Romantics | The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion | 6:45 PM | More info

🗓️ Friday Night Heights | 8:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Ultimate Duck Dash, All Ages | 8:30 AM | More info

🗓️ Slither Back To School | 10:00 AM | More info

🗓️ The Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers with Southall | The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion | 6:30 PM | More info

🗓️ 2026 YES to YOUTH Gala | The Woodlands Waterway Marriott | More info

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The master plan for The Woodlands was drawn in 1972, two years before anyone moved in. Bob Hendricks, who helped build the place, later estimated that what stands today is ninety percent or more of what was on that original paper.

“He’ll squeeze a nickel till the buffalo screams.” Translation: he is not turning loose of a dollar without a fight.

Nobody in the history of the world has ever finished a tube of chapstick.

What do you call a pile of cats? A meowtain.