A History that Grows in the Telling

The Chicken Ranch was a brothel, pure and simple. Not so pure, and nowhere near as simple, were the motives of those who closed it down. Therein hangs this tale.

Not that this story hasn't been told before, after a fashion. Four decades removed from its spectacular, primetime closure by a crusading Houston television station, the "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" remains one of the most infamous brothels ever to operate in the United States, if not the world.

Yet the trappings of the tawdry, media-driven sex scandal — titillation, notoriety, celebrity — are ill suited to what never amounted to anything more than an unassuming little country whorehouse tucked back amidst the post oaks and cedar trees just beyond the city limits of La Grange, Texas, less than a mile off State Highway 71 on an unpaved county road.

The Chicken Ranch, unlike the personalities that came to dominate its final days, was never larger than life. The owners kept their heads down and noses clean, paid their taxes and stayed on the good side of the law and politicians. The brothel's relations with the community at large were helped immensely by its madams being generous civic benefactors.

The fact that prostitution flourished in La Grange for well over a century did not make the town unique. In that aspect, at least, La Grange claimed no different pedigree from the scores of other cities and small towns across Texas that found a booming trade in illicit sex.

What set the Chicken Ranch apart was its venerable history. By 1973, it was the last man standing, so to speak, the lone holdout against changing times that shuttered pretty much all of its one-time contemporaries. The story of the Chicken Ranch is very much the story of Texas, in a literal as well as metaphorical sense.

From the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, long before vast oilfields covered the landscape and "black gold" made the state rich, the Texas economy depended on three industries: cattle, cotton and timber. A casual observer of the time could not be blamed, though, for thinking of prostitution as a fourth major cash crop.

As Texas' frontier society developed, sex followed settlements. One of the earliest records of prostitution dates to 1817 in what eventually became San Antonio, when nine women were run out of the Spanish colonial outpost for whoring. Unsurprisingly, that did not end vice in San Antonio, or anywhere else in Texas for that matter.

Prostitutes soon appeared in every Texas settlement of note. El Paso, the westernmost city in Texas and a crossroads of the Spanish empire in the New World, had to contend with prostitution on an ongoing basis, but the newer, Anglo-American settlements found out firsthand that commercial sex was not a genie easily kept in the bottle. Houston, established following Texas' 1836 independence from Mexico, grew so rapidly that by 1840, the Harris County Commissioners' Court licensed scores of bordellos in a futile attempt to keep the city's rampant vice under control. Galveston, which developed into an important seaport after its founding in 1830, attracted prostitutes right from the start to satisfy lusty sailors. Despite this statewide precedent, prostitution did not find its way to La Grange quite so quickly or directly.

For thousands of years prior to the arrival of European settlers, a variety of Native American tribes continuously inhabited the land that would compose Fayette County. At the time of Stephen F. Austin's colonization efforts in the 1820s, Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas predominated, but Waco and Comanche raiding parties were also common. It didn't take any great imagination to see why the region so appealed to the various tribes. The fertile Colorado River Valley bisected the land west to east, rich with pecan, black walnut and oak trees. To the north stood an arm of the Lost Pines Forest, with the rest of the area dominated by rolling blackland prairie and post oak savannah. Wild game abounded, with buffalo, white-tailed deer, black bear, beaver and countless other species thriving in the forests and fields.

La Bahia Road, an important route through Texas since at least 1690 under Spanish colonial rule, cut through the heart of the region, crossing the Colorado below a prominent, two-hundred-foot limestone bluff. Enterprising Anglo pioneers from the United States set up trading posts near the crossing, taking advantage of the regular traffic, but not until 1822 did settlers of European descent — members of Austin's "Old Three Hundred" — arrive in significant numbers.

Almost from the start the whites and the natives clashed. The first recorded battle occurred in 1823 on Skull Creek, when a hastily assembled troop of twenty-two settlers destroyed a Karankawa camp harassing whites along the river. The Karankawas, more commonly associated with the Texas Coastal Bend, were generally reviled by settlers and rival tribes alike for their reputed cannibalism. At the end of the fight, twenty-three Karankawas lay dead, without the loss of a single settler.

The settlers and the Lipans remained on relatively good terms for the next decade, with Lipan warriors often serving as scouts for the whites and both groups uniting against the ever-present threat of Comanche raiders. Relations with the Tonkawas were cooler. Indian attacks constantly threatened the isolated farms and homesteads. Many settlers died in raids, but far more natives died through the settlers' retaliations. During the years of the Republic of Texas, the influx of newcomers from the United States and Europe displaced the tribes, forcing them westward. The last recorded Indian raid casualty in Fayette County came in 1840, when a party of Wacos ambushed and shot Henry Earthman.

For nearly twenty years prior, however, the isolated settlers viewed Indian attacks as a most serious threat. To guard against the danger, in 1826 Tennessean and Old Three Hundred settler John Henry Moore built a fortified blockhouse half a mile from where La Bahia Road crossed the Colorado River. Over the course of the following decade, newcomers took advantage of the protection offered by "Moore's Fort," as it was called, and by the time of the Texas Revolution, the town of La Grange had coalesced.

In the heady aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto, with Texans reveling in their independence from Mexico, La Grange experienced perhaps its closest brush with fame prior to the closure of the Chicken Ranch more than a century hence. Formally created during the Second Congress of the Republic of Texas in December 1837, Fayette County was carved from the existing counties of Bastrop and Colorado. Formally platted at that time, La Grange was designated the county seat. The following...