Here’s a little window into the history behind the now-for-sale Champion Ranch in Centerville, about 50 miles north of Huntsville: Richard Wallrath bought the property in the 1993 with money he’d earned from running Champion Window, the business he started in 1975. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo mega-donor sold the company to Atrium Windows in 2006 for $66 million. (Within 6 years, Atrium was out of the manufacturing business after it filed for bankruptcy, and the Department of Homeland Security fined it $2 million when it found that more than half of Champion’s 489 workers were undocumented.)
Included in the offering, according to the broker, Icon Global: “movie rights to Deep in the Heart” — starring Jon Gries (Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite) as Wallrath and Val Kilmer as “The Bearded Man,” Wallrath’s spiritual guide. Parts of the movie were filmed on the 5,000-plus-acre ranch itself. A sequel, says Icon, is now “in development.”
A cinematic view across this field shows some of the 1,010 purebred cattle that come with the purchase:
