Rural Charm Lures Newcomers to Taylor, Texas—Then Samsung’s Semiconductor Plant Arrives

A red thresher cuts across the countryside off County Road 401 in Taylor, Texas, leaving tufts of discarded stalks as farmers ready the soil for next year’s planting.

Less than five miles away, mom‑and‑pop antique shops line North Main Street, inviting residents and tourists to glimpse the city’s 19th‑century railroad‑town heritage.

The scene fits the picture of an “iconic rural town of roughly 17,000,” a description that drew many newer homeowners after the pandemic.

Sarah Medina, 38, a creative director for an Austin‑based hospitality group, moved to south Taylor with her husband five‑and‑a‑half years ago. She said the family sought “some land” and found “affordable land” in a “potentially up‑and‑coming and cool” area with arts​y fun stuff.

Medina’s husband, Tate Green, teaches career and technical education at the junior high and high school in Coupland, about 10 miles south of Taylor. Together they cultivated about an acre, raising pigs, chickens, guinea hens, goats and geese, and built a homestead they intended to keep for life.

That vision has been slowly fracturing since Samsung broke ground in 2022 on a semiconductor facility. The project, valued at $17 billion, occupies a sprawling 1,200‑acre campus roughly a mile from the Medina‑Green house.

Medina explained, We moved for a small‑town feel, for a tighter‑knit community, for the ability to afford some land and do some agricultural stuff, and to have space for our kids to run around. We did not move here to be closer to any kind of tech. It’s not part of the appeal.

As the semiconductor campus rises, the Medina‑Greens find their rural lifestyle increasingly intersecting with large‑scale industrial development.

Taylor, located about 35 miles northeast of Austin, continues to balance its historic identity with the presence of a major high‑tech investment.