The Selling of The Chicken Ranch – One Square Inch at a Time
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The Selling of The Chicken Ranch – One Square Inch at a Time
50 Years after it closed, The Record is running a series of articles this summer looking back at the key figures surrounding the Chicken Ranch and the complicated legacy it has left behind.
A ug. 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the closing of The Chicken Ranch in La Grange. In 1986, more than a decade after it closed, Houston developers Todd Hoffman and Bob Burns bought the property with plans to develop it into a tourist attraction.
They surveyed the property and had a portion of it split into one-inch square lots – 26,928,000 to be exact. They sold the lots for $8 a piece, about the price of a night visit back in the Ranch’s heyday. Buyers received an official deed.
In an interview with United Press International (UPI) that year, Hoffman said their plans called for a familyfriendly museum. All of the property owners would have access. The developers got a lot of pushback from La Grange locals who were trying to forget the brothel’s notorious history. Their plans fizzled, but not before they sold many of the one-inch squares.
Over the years, some of the purchasers tried to file their deeds at the Fayette County Clerk’s Office. According to a former Fayette County elected official, the County Clerk at the time refused to file the deeds at first but eventually relented and 328 of them were filed in a bound index and volume titled “C.R. 1.” The first ones were filed in 1987 and the last one was filed in 2001.
Current Fayette County Clerk Brenda Fietsam recently located that volume at the request of the Record.
Fietsam said she knows little about the history of the land transactions involving the old Chicken Ranch property. She did not know whether any of the purchasers of the one-inch squares have or ever had any legal claim to the property. According to the Fayette County Appraisal District Records, the property is owned today by The Chicken Ranch LLC, a company with an address in Waco.
Fietsam said she plans to preserve the historic deed records for posterity.