On a late-summer evening in September, the barn on Highfield Road in Park City will open its doors to anyone who loves the weight of a vintage candy dish or the particular warmth of a hand-poured candle. It's the kind of gathering that doesn't advertise itself loudly, a free community market of local artisans selling vintage finds, retro glassware, gifts, and seasonal baked goods over a shared snack-and-drink table. The occasion is Betty Byrd's barn party, and at its center is a woman named Amber Howe and a beloved 1966 Serro Scotty camper that goes by the name Betty.
Betty Byrd is Howe's vintage resale business, and its name is no marketing invention. Betty is the family's old trailer, a sleek, canned-ham-shaped camper that Howe and her husband bought after a particularly miserable tent-camping trip in the Southern Utah desert. According to the Betty Byrd website, they found Betty on Memorial Day in 2011, when she "shone like a retro star among the rest of the generic RVs listed in the classifieds." In the space of a 13-foot cottage on wheels, the couple spent eight weeks exploring the West that first summer and countless adventures in the years that followed. The camper, small but full of charm, became the backdrop for family memories.
But a growing family changes the math on minimal square footage. When their first son, Oden, joined the camping trips in 2016, it became clear that Betty's adorable interior was no longer enough. What did they do with the beloved trailer they couldn't bear to part with? They put her into storage, certain that their story together wasn't over.
That belief proved right in a way no one could have predicted. In December 2023, Howe launched Betty Byrd Vintage & Gifts with a two-day Christmas pop-up event. Friends, family, neighbors, and a few strangers gathered around her old camper and a firepit, perused vintage decor and housewares, sipped mulled wine, and swapped holiday nostalgia. It was, as Howe describes it, the start of Betty's next chapter. The launch tapped into something Howe has felt her whole life. "I've always just been a really nostalgic person. I take all the pictures. I love the history of things," she told TownLift.
Betty soon made the rounds at local pop-up markets, including a stint at a summer farmers market. That turned out to be the wrong stage for her wares. A farmers market, Howe found, wasn't quite the right fit for the delicate glassware and fragile finds she lovingly curated. So she moved the business to her own property in Silver Creek, where she now hosts three or four barn parties a year, complete with food, drinks, and a rotating lineup of local vendors. The address, 8839 Highfield Road, is also home to a sprawling lavender field on land Howe and her husband moved to less than two years ago.
The barn parties have quietly become a launching pad for other small businesses, which Howe seems to consider the whole point. "I want it to be a local artist spot where they can sell their wares, because they're small businesses trying to grow, like me," she explained. "We can share our friend groups and just start. Word of mouth is the best way with new businesses."
The upcoming Sept. 18 gathering runs from 4:30 to 7 p.m. and brings together a specific circle of local makers. Kitty Llewellyn of Kitty's Little Bakery, a Midway-based home baker known for scones and cookies that sell out fast, will be there. So will Anna and Ken Kozole, a Silver Creek couple whose KmKDesignsPC and Tips Up ventures pair Anna's jewelry designs with Ken's vintage-ski shot skis, and Nancy Christiansen, who sells crocheted pieces with a vintage-inspired style. Natalie Heartier of Caspia Creations and Lauren Montgomery of LaMont Designs round out the rotating lineup. Shoppers can expect vintage items, collectibles, retro decor, glassware, gifts, hand-poured candles, and seasonal baked goods.
What makes the event unusual, beyond the setting, is how Howe keeps costs manageable for everyone involved. Rather than charging the vendors a traditional booth fee, she asks vendors and guests to contribute to a shared snack-and-drink table. In an era of expensive ticketed markets, the barn party is a grassroots affair — free and open, easy to drop by, built on potluck generosity. It suits the philosophy behind the enterprise.
The market season's first big event this year, the Lavender Festival, made inspired use of the property. Guests could trim their own lavender bundles from the field, while Howe made lavender soap and lavender syrup for drinks. Katie's lavender scones and cookies rounded out the spread, tying the farm and the vintage sensibility together into one sensory experience.
Howe's approach to sourcing is as eclectic as her inventory. She hunts for treasures on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Etsy, thrift stores, and the occasional estate cleanout, and she takes tips from customers looking to part with belongings. Some finds get a second life in an unexpected form. "I don't know if you remember Grandma's old candy dishes that had the lid on top," she said. "I turn them into these candles and give them another purpose." It's the same spirit that runs through the whole business — the belief that beautiful things with a past deserve a new life, collected with intention, sometimes repurposed, and shared with love.
That love of story is at the heart of it all. "I love when people are like, 'Oh, this reminds me of my mom' or 'This reminds me of my grandma.' It just evokes that feeling of nostalgia or happy memories," Howe said. For her, each object in the barn carries a quiet history, and the barn parties create a place where those histories can be shared out loud.
Betty the camper still plays a role beyond the property. Howe also runs smaller mobile markets with the trailer itself, including one planned for October in Heber, and the barn party season wraps up each year with a Christmas gathering featuring mulled wine, a Christmas tree, gift wrapping, and a firepit — a nod back to the two-day December pop-up where it all began. The rhythm of the year, then, is a string of small moments: lavender on a summer afternoon, vintage glassware in a barn on a September evening, mulled wine by the fire come December.
The barn party on Sept. 18 is one of those moments, free for anyone willing to wander up Highfield Road. There will be vintage dishes and retro decor, hand-poured candles made from old candy dishes, scones that sell out fast, the chatter of small-business owners who are each other's best customers, and a table of shared snacks brought by whoever showed up. None of it would exist without a 1966 camper and a family that refused to let her go. Betty just keeps finding new ways to carry people along.