LBJ State Park and Historic Site

During the summer after I graduated high school in 2006, I journeyed again with my dad and about 40 middle school and high school history teachers on an NEH Teaching American History Teachers grant summer bus tour. On this trip we visited a number of historic sites all across Texas. On our way to Lyndon Baines Johnson's Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, we made a stop at his boyhood home in the Texas Hill Country near Johnson City.  

In 1965, LBJ donated the land where he grew up to the State of Texas and is now part of the LBJ National Historic Park. The park includes several sites including a visitor's center, his boyhood home, the Johnson Settlement, LBJ's first school, the "Texas White House," the Johnson Family Cemetery, and a beautiful field of wildflowers commissioned by Lady Bird Johnson.  

LBJ's great-grandfather settled there in 1860, and LBJ lived in his home near the original settlement until he graduated high school in 1924. LBJ's first school is located on the ranch, which is also the site where he signed the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. After Johnson was elected president, he built his Texas White House so that he would have a place to come home to during his administration, and Lady Bird Johnson lived there until her death in 2007. It became open to the public in 2008. LBJ had a deep attachment to his home in the Texas Hill Country and was laid to rest there at the Johnson Family Cemetery in 1973.