Looking to Acquire a Ghost Town in West Texas? Your Opportunity Has Arrived!

Lobo, Texas, has gone through more transformations than Madonna. In the 1850s this lonely patch of West Texas, roughly halfway between Van Horn and Valentine on U.S. 90, was just some land on top of the recently discovered Van Horn Wells, the only water source in a hundred-mile radius. In the 1860s it was little more than a stop on the San Antonio–San Diego mail route, and in the 1880s it was a place where steam locomotives could refill their water tanks on their journey out to far West Texas. Lobo finally got a post office in 1907, and for decades in the mid-twentieth century it was a hub for the region’s thriving cotton farming community, though Lobo’s population never surpassed one hundred. In the 1980s the aquifer was just about pumped dry, and by 1991 Lobo was a ghost town. It spent the next decade completely empty, its remaining structures—a gas station, a motel, the grocery store, and a few abandoned houses—withering away under the harsh West Texas winds, until a handful of artists from Frankfurt, Germany, decided to buy it and make it their own. 

“One of my friends drove by it in 1999, so [two years later, in 2001] we pooled our money and bought the town,” recalls Alexander Bardorff, one of Lobo’s Frankfurter owners, and the only one of the group who lives in the United States (he currently resides in Tucson, Arizona). Bardorff declined to say how much the group paid. The Germans fixed up Lobo as best they could, digging new wells, installing a bathhouse, and giving the remaining buildings new roofs and windows. 

For twenty years these bohemians used Lobo as a way to get away from it all, hosting music and film festivals and inviting artists from all over the world. But since nobody lived on the property year-round, there was always a lot of upkeep. “You come back after a year and things have been destroyed, and then you have to start over again,” recalls Bardorff. The Germans were also plagued by the same worry that ails many a Texan landowner: are we going to run out of water this year? When borders were closed during the pandemic, Bardorff was the only owner who could even hope to visit. As time passed, the property became more and more difficult to maintain. “I’ll be seventy years old in a month, and all my other friends are in Germany, so we’re just running out of energy,” says Bardorff. Which means the ghost town is ready to go through its next great transformation, and any one of us could be the one to shepherd Lobo through it.

This article originally appeared in Texas Monthly. To read the full article, click here.