Lyndon Johnson Boyhood Home & Ranch
Johnson City, Texas
Photos and text © Gleaves Whitney 2005
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Hauenstein leadership fellows drove up into the Texas Hill Country to spend the day touring Lyndon Johnson's boyhood home (left) and ranch. The boyhood home is in Johnson City, and the ranch is near Stonewall. Both sites are administered by the National Park Service.
The boyhood home was built in 1901 by W. C. Russell, sheriff of Blanco County. The style is Folk Victorian. The president's father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr, paid $2,925 for the house and surrounding 1-3/4 acres.
By the way, the "Johnson" in Johnson City refers not to the 36th president but to another family member, James Polk Johnson, who was related to LBJ's grandfather. -
Brian Flanagan, Melissa Ware, and Gleaves Whitney toured the home Lyndon Johnson's family moved into when LBJ was five years old. He lived mostly in this house until he married Lady Bird at age 26.
LBJ returned to this porch during the first week of March 1937 to announce his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives for the Tenth District of the State of Texas. He was 28 years old.
So began a career in public service that spanned more than three decades and culminated in the presidency of the United States. -
At the front of the house, opposite the porch, Brian and Melissa sit where the five Johnson children (and sometimes neighborhood kids) used to learn about oratory, debate, and civic participation from their schoolteacher mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson. Education was her passion -- she was one of the few college educated women in the area. All five of her children would go to college.
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Young Lyndon learned about politics mostly from his father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. This room, the parents' bedroom, doubled as the place where men would come and meet with Sam, who was a state representative for 12 years. Lyndon learned early about the rough and tumble of representative government by listening surrreptitiously to conversations, either through the door or -- legend has it -- under the floor.
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This bookcase preserves the books Lyndon was exposed to as a child. Among other works, it contains the plays of Shakespeare and a multi-volume set about Jefferson. It also has Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.
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This gate along the Pedernales River marks the old entrance to the LBJ Ranch. Across the river is the ranch house that served as the Western White House during the Johnson administration.
In the Texas Hill County, "Pedernales" is pronounced "perd-n-alice." It is Spanish for hard or flinty rocks. -
This one-room schoolhouse near Stonewall is where four-year-old Lyndon learned to read. As president 53 years later, LBJ came back to the schoolhouse to sign the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that he had lobbied for. His teacher was at the signing ceremony.
In all, President Johnson signed more than 60 federal education bills. -
In this house near Stonewall, on August 27, 1908, the first child was born to Sam and Rebekah Johnson. For several weeks the parents couldn't decide what to name the boy -- they called him "Baby." Eventually they named him Lyndon Baines.