Max Beckman built a tin clad dance hall with wooden beams and hinged side flaps for ventilation in 1922, in a village of about fifty people, and German brass bands rotated through it from the other halls in the county. The settlement had been founded in 1877 as Martinsburg by Fritz Wilke, George Maenius and John Petri, who left Fredericksburg looking for pasture. Its post office ran from 1877 to 1886, after which the mail was routed through Hye. The name changed in 1892 when Albert Luckenbach, who had sold his store in the village that carries his family's name about ten miles west, arrived and registered a new post office under his own first name. So Albert and Luckenbach are named for the same family, one by surname and one by Christian name.
Lyndon Johnson went to school at Albert too, enrolled at the Williams Creek school for the 1920 to 1921 year, a limestone building raised on a one and a half acre tract bought for five dollars in 1897.
The village has been bought and sold as a single object several times. A real estate agent named Bobby Cave bought the whole of it in 2004 and restored it. In 2007 he listed it on eBay with a reserve of two and a half million dollars, and the auction closed that November on a winning bid of three million eight hundred thousand from a bidder in Italy. Cave said plainly that an eBay listing gave him no way to make a man in Italy write the cheque. By 2009 the town was carved up and back on the market at eight hundred and eighty three thousand.
Getting there
30.1939, -98.6015
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Hear it from the road
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