The Chicken Ranch stood on eleven acres outside La Grange, two blocks from the road to Houston. The Handbook of Texas says a madam called Miss Jessie Williams, born Faye Stewart, bought the land after learning of a coming crusade against the red-light district on the Colorado River. In the Depression she began taking chickens as payment, and the house took its name from what the Handbook calls the poultry standard. It ran until 1973.
The arrangement
The sheriff of Jessie's day stopped by every evening for gossip about outlaws who had boasted there. When T. J. Flournoy took office in 1946 he put in a direct line to the house, and the Handbook says he fingerprinted and photographed every new employee. A criminal record meant no job. The women saw a doctor weekly, shopped with local merchants and were forbidden to socialize in town. Edna Milton, who arrived from Oklahoma in 1952 at 23, bought the place from Jessie's heirs for $30,000 and ran it the same way. The Handbook estimates that the women gave Milton 75 percent and still made $300 a week, and that the house took in more than $500,000 a year. A door attendant admitted only White, sober, presentable men. Flournoy was later credited with solving every murder and bank robbery in Fayette County in his 34 years, and the Handbook says the house helped.
August 1973
Marvin Zindler of KTRK-TV in Houston ran a week of reports on the ranch. The Handbook says state police had already watched it for two months without finding ties to organized crime, but Governor Dolph Briscoe could not ignore the pressure. By Wednesday, August 1, the house was shut. The Fayette County Record of August 7 quoted Briscoe saying, "It is permanently closed and that resolves the problem," and Flournoy saying he could close it with a phone call.
The Record has Flournoy skipping the Austin meeting as nothing but a television show, while the Handbook has him arriving with a petition of nearly 3,000 names to learn that Briscoe had canceled. The Chamber of Commerce president and manager denied circulating petitions, and the mayor called it a county matter. A Friday call-in poll on KVLG ran 59 against the house and 43 for it. The Record's editorial said most residents disapproved of the house and urged the town to close the subject.
What came after
Customers kept turning up for more than two years. According to the Handbook, most of the women left for Austin or Houston, and the down payment Milton offered on a house in La Grange was returned. In 1977 part of the building was moved to Dallas to become a restaurant with Milton as hostess, and it closed in January 1978. Flournoy resigned in 1980, saying he and his wife were tired of hearing the name. When he died in October 1982, Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby and nearly 100 lawmen came to the funeral.
The ranch is gone. On the bluff above the Colorado, Monument Hill and the Kreische Brewery hold the common tomb of the men who died in the Dawson fight and the Mier expedition, beside the brewery Heinrich Kreische opened in 1860.