Texas Venue Directory
El Maton National Hall
Historic dance hall and event center · El Maton
Historic Matagorda County dance hall with public events and private-event rentals.
About this room
The building went up around 1919 as a schoolhouse, on land that later belonged to Louis Popek, and was moved half a mile south of State Highway 35 on FM 1095, where it went on serving as a school in its new location. In 1941 it was sold to the SPJST and designated a National Hall, and it passed through the Czech fraternal orders that ran community life in Matagorda County. It was sold into private hands and expanded in 1981, and Joe Kalas owned and operated it as a dance hall by 1985. Linda Salyer bought it out of weeds and rotting floors in 2001 and reopened it in 2002; that run is remembered locally for a Thursday summer series. Eric Kacer bought it in the summer of 2021 and runs it as a dance hall and event center.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- It is a schoolhouse that was picked up and moved, and it taught school in both places. Source
- The Thursday summer series drew four hundred screaming teenagers to a town this size. People still tell the current owner about driving to El Maton to hear the Emotions play. Source
- The town got its name from railroad men. El Maton became a rice and cattle shipping point after the Missouri-Pacific was induced to lay track to Blessing and built a large switch there. Source
- The local blacksmith was a folk hero for a snakebite. Emil L. Balusek saved a friend bitten by a rattlesnake and was regarded as a hero in El Maton afterward; after he died in 1960 the shop was run by a man known as 'Doc' Lane until 1964. Source
- Six World War I veterans bought land here with federal farm loan assistance in 1936, and their families still held property in the area decades later. Source
- The current owner is publicly asking for the hall's own history. Kacer says his research only reaches back to the 1960s and has posted an open request for information or photographs from the 1940s onward. Source
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