George Bush Family Home

🏛️The era

When the young Bush family arrived in West Texas in 1948, the country was just finding its feet after World War II. Millions of veterans were coming home, starting families, and looking for a foothold in a booming peacetime economy. For an ambitious few, that foothold was oil.

The Permian Basin, the vast oil-bearing region around Midland and Odessa, was one of the busiest places in the American petroleum business. Postwar America ran on gasoline: new cars, new highways, and new suburbs all drove up demand. Small independent operators, wildcatters, and young men with borrowed capital poured into the region hoping to strike it rich.

Midland became the business hub of that boom. Odessa had the roughnecks and equipment yards, and Midland had the offices, the landmen, and the deal-makers. Whole neighborhoods went up quickly to house the newcomers, which is how a street of brightly painted, look-alike houses could earn a nickname like "Easter Egg Row."

The 1950s in Midland were full of young families, new schools, and lots of children. The Bush household, with its toddlers and its father building a business, fit right in.

👥People & events

George H. W. Bush came to Texas as a Navy veteran and a new college graduate. He could have taken an easier path back East. Instead he took a modest job as an equipment clerk in Odessa, learning the oil business from the ground up. Within a year he had been promoted to salesman and sent to California, but the family soon came back to Texas and to Midland.

In Midland, Bush went from employee to entrepreneur. With his neighbor and friend John Overbey he started a small oil development company, and a few years later the two joined with the Liedtke brothers to form Zapata Petroleum. Drilling success brought enough money to move the growing family into this larger house on West Ohio.

This house holds the family's deepest grief. Here, the Bushes' young daughter Robin fell ill with leukemia, a disease doctors of the time could do very little to treat. She died in the fall of 1953, not yet four years old. George and Barbara Bush spoke publicly about that loss for the rest of their lives, and it shaped them both.

The house also saw new beginnings. Jeb, the third child, was born while the family lived here. Young George W. walked to the nearby elementary school from this front door. In 1956 the family moved to a bigger house in Midland, and in 1959 they left for Houston. George W. later came back to Midland to start his own oil career, and there he married Laura Welch, a Midland native, in 1977.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Few American houses can claim ties to two presidents. George H. W. Bush became the 41st President of the United States, and his son George W. Bush became the 43rd. Barbara Bush and Laura Bush both became First Lady. Jeb Bush, born while the family lived here, went on to a career in politics as well. Only one other father and son, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, have both held the presidency.

The house also tells a bigger story about how the oil economy shaped modern America. The Bush family's move from New England to West Texas reflects the shift of money, population, and political power toward the Sun Belt in the decades after World War II. Texas oil money and Texas politics became central to national life, and the Bush family is one of the clearest examples.

Finally, this is a reminder that presidents start out as ordinary people living ordinary lives. In this small-town house, a young family worried about money, raised children, and lost a daughter. Those experiences came with them all the way to the White House.

🧭If you visit

You'll find the house in a quiet residential part of Midland, a modest mid-century home that looks a lot like its neighbors. That is a big part of its appeal: it shows how a typical young oil-boom family lived in the early 1950s, long before anyone imagined a presidency.

The home is known today as the George W. Bush Childhood Home and has been preserved as a historic site. Check ahead for visiting details before you go. As you stand outside, picture a boy walking off to elementary school and a young father driving off to chase his next oil deal.

Midland makes a good stop on a West Texas road trip. Look for the oil rigs and pumpjacks out on the flat landscape around the city; they are the industry that drew the Bushes here in the first place. Nearby Odessa, where George H. W. Bush took his first job, is just down the highway, so you can easily see both ends of the family's West Texas start.