Luckenbach is an unincorporated community thirteen miles (19 km) from Fredericksburg in southeastern Gillespie County, Texas, United States, part of the Texas Hill Country. It consists of 9.142 acres (37,000 m2) between South Grape Creek (a tributary of the Pedernales River) and Snail Creek, just south of U.S. Highway 290 on the south side of Farm to Market Road 1376. This location is roughly 50 miles (80 km) north of San Antonio and 69 miles (111 km) west of Austin.
Its oldest building is a combination general store and saloon reputedly opened in 1849 (1886 is more likely based on land improvement records of the state library) by Minna Engel, whose father was an itinerant preacher from Germany. The community, first named Grape Creek, was later named after Minna's husband, Carl Albert Luckenbach, who was then her fiance; they would later move to another town which became Albert, Texas. Luckenbach was first established as a community trading post and was one of the few that never broke a peace treaty with the Comanche Indians, with whom they bartered and traded.
Citizens of the town claimed one of them (Jacob Brodbeck) had launched the first airplane years before the Wright Brothers.[1]
Its population increased to a high of 492 in 1904, but by the 1960s, Luckenbach was almost a ghost town.
An ad in the paper offering "town — pop. 3 — for sale" led Hondo Crouch, rancher and Texas folklorist, to buy Luckenbach for $30,000 in 1970, in partnership with Kathy Morgan and actor Guich Koock. Hondo used the town's rights as a municipality to govern the dance hall as he saw fit.
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