Mustang, Texas: Incorporated to Sell Beer

In nineteen seventy-three, a former Corsicana city attorney named William McKie and a businessman named Harold McElhenney filed to incorporate a new town in Navarro County. The county was dry. Their new town would not be.

Mustang, Texas existed for one purpose: to sell alcohol in a county where it was otherwise illegal. They opened a liquor store and a dance hall, and residents from across Navarro County made the drive. At its height in nineteen ninety, Mustang had thirty-five people and a functioning retail economy built entirely on beer and spirits.

Then Navarro County liberalized its liquor laws, and the town's reason for existing evaporated. By the two thousand twenty census, the population was zero. In twenty twenty-one, then Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban purchased the ghost town.

What he plans to do with it remains unclear.