Got $100K? You Could Own This Entire Ghost Town In Texas

The tiny West Texas ghost city of Lobo on U.S. 90 in Culberson County isn’t on the market, at the very least for now. It was offered for $100,000 in October 2023. However primarily based on its hardscrabble historical past, there’s probability it could be up for grabs once more in just a few years.

Or possibly not. Maybe the brand new homeowners will handle to remodel the deserted city (inhabitants 0 because the Eighties), turning it into a kind of ghost towns that are still considered “home” today by at the very least just a few hardy inhabitants.

It might be arduous to duplicate the success of the artsy mecca Marfa, which is just 60 miles to the southeast and attracts about 50,000 guests yearly. Nevertheless, matching neighbor Valentine (population 65) nonetheless appears throughout the realm of chance.

How Lobo, Texas Got here Into Being

Lobo arose from stage and rail line enlargement

Lobo, Texas was born from an actual property swindle. However the city’s existence, 12 miles from Van Horn, one other of the small towns in West Texas people love visiting, was made doable by railroad enlargement in the course of the nineteenth century.

The Van Horn Wells, found in 1849, had been so essential to the recent, dusty area that when the San Antonio to San Diego stagecoach mail route was developed a decade or so later – the legendary “Jackass Mail” – the wells had been included as a cease.

The railroad got here subsequent in 1882, leading to a water properly in what would quickly be Lobo. Larry Francell, one-time director of the Museum of the Huge Bend in close by Alpine, defined why to Texas Standard:

“They needed to water these locomotives, ‘trigger they’re steam locomotives, and so they needed to have coal”. So that they “laid out these locations that they referred to as cities or established names and hoped individuals would go there”.

Nevertheless, it was nonetheless one other 25 years till a submit workplace was established. The city itself wasn’t laid out till 1909. That is the place the swindle got here in. Promoters promised the city’s purchasers a resort, however no such resort existed.

As images from the period attest, the brand new homeowners efficiently sued and acquired a powerful lodging constructed, and by 1914 Lobo had grown to a decent 20 inhabitants.

The Temporary Rise & Fall of Lobo, Texas

Water helped to construct Lobo and when it dried out, so did the city

Regardless of inhabitants fluctuations all through the twentieth century, Lobo by no means attracted greater than 100 individuals. The resort proved to be a short-lived amenity. An earthquake in 1929 tore it down, almost taking the city with it. Inside just a few years of the disaster, the inhabitants had been lower in half to 10.

Native industries like railroads and the Texas Mica Firm helped Lobo recuperate to about 25 individuals within the Forties. Shortly afterward, irrigation enhancements within the space led to a quick golden age in Lobo. By the Nineteen Sixties, the city had 90 individuals and seemed to be rising. Cotton was planted and its onions, one among a number of staple crops launched throughout this era – tomatoes and beans being the others – had been offered as far-off as New York Metropolis.

However then the water desk beneath the tiny city plummeted by as a lot as 70 to 90 ft, making extraction too costly to justify. By the Eighties, Lobo had ceased to perform as a city. Such outcomes will not be precisely unusual in Texas. The state of Texas is home to the most ghost towns in the country, with about 500.

The Sale Of Lobo, Texas To Non-public Homeowners

Now a Texas couple is in search of to revive the city’s fortunes

There are good reasons to visit Marfa, Texas, or to explore the Wild West at the Terlingua ghost town within the state. However why would individuals come to Lobo?

When several German friends purchased the place in 2001 for a fraction of its reported asking worth ($60,000), they’d some fascinating plans. One later realized was an experimental movie competition through which the city’s defunct fuel station was reimagined as a theater for film screenings.

So whereas it could seem the brand new homeowners, Dennis and Bonnie Berry of Corpus Christie, have overpaid, in addition they have some concepts. Certainly, a imaginative and prescient for the longer term was a part of the asking price. Income-generating plans into consideration embody the introduction of rental properties and maybe a stay music venue. However even when all of it involves naught, as issues normally do in Lobo, it bears noting that they purchased a whole city for lower than a 3rd of the value of a median Texas dwelling.

“We’re in a holding sample proper now, however we’re excited,” Bonnie Berry famous lately, by way of
The Dallas Morning News
. “It’s such a neat, distinctive location.”