Historic Markers in Texas

Brookeland, TX

Lowe Cemetery honors Barnabas Colistus "Barney" Lowe, a pioneer who reached Texas around 1832 and earned 640 acres for his service in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution. Burials here date to 1840 and include nine citizens of the Republic of Texas and veterans spanning the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and the Korean War. It is also called Stumptown Cemetery, for the community that clear-cut its virgin timber by 1925.

Rusk, TX

Settlers from the southern states reached this part of Cherokee County by the late 1840s, and Lowe's Chapel Cemetery began soon after — local tradition says with a child from a passing wagon train, buried beneath a pile of rocks. E. H. Lowe deeded five acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in a deed recorded in 1882, and dozens of area families are buried here alongside veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam. An annual homecoming has drawn descendants for more than eighty years.

Rio Vista, TX

John Wesley Smith, a Civil War veteran and banker, came to Johnson County in 1868 and in 1887 built this house from pine and poplar salvaged from an 1850 dwelling, fastening it with square iron nails. The reuse of older lumber and hand-forged nails reflects the frugal, resourceful building practices of frontier Texas. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Stonewall, TX

Area settlers built a log schoolhouse along South Grape Creek in 1871, first as part of the Luckenbach precinct and, after 1889, as its own District No. 21. In 1901 the log building gave way to this stuccoed limestone structure with an open plan and a bell tower capped by a pyramidal roof—typical of early-1900s rural schools in the Texas Hill Country. The school served the community until it closed in 1960 and merged with Fredericksburg.

Amarillo, TX

In the early 1900s Amarillo was a young, ambitious railroad town eager for the trappings of a settled city — and a military university promised discipline, education, and prestige on the high plains. Lowery-Phillips Military University served that hope only briefly, closing its doors in 1917 as the nation turned toward the Great War. The buildings found a second life sheltering children at the Amarillo Children's Home before finally being demolished in 1966.

Lancaster, TX

Tennessee-born James Barker Lowrey brought his family to Texas in 1859 and, in 1881, bought this 124-acre tract in Dallas County. He passed it to his son Nicholas, who carried on the family's farming and cattle raising, and though the land was briefly divided, Lowrey's son-in-law John S. Hurst later reunited it. The homestead stayed in the same family for more than a hundred years.

Valley Mills, TX

Born in Nacogdoches in 1824, Lowry Hampton Scrutchfield came to the Brazos country as a boy and learned surveying from the frontier figure George B. Erath, who also introduced him to local Indian tribes. In 1849 he helped survey Waco Village, then settled on the Pool land and emerged as the leading organizer of the pioneers who founded Bosque County. In 1854 his neighbors elected him the new county's first chief justice.

Vega, TX

This sturdy sandstone house was built in 1886 for the manager of the sprawling LS Ranch, owned by W.M.D. Lee and Lucien B. Scott in the Texas Panhandle. Stonemason Tom Nolan reportedly modeled it and its twin bunkhouse on a picture from an Arbuckle Coffee sack. Its first resident manager was Jim East, a former Tascosa sheriff, and the home stayed in one family's hands for generations after 1939.

Livingston, TX

Raised in Livingston, James M. Parker Jr. joined the Army Air Corps and, as the United States entered World War II, volunteered for the Doolittle Raid—the daring first American strike on the Japanese mainland. In April 1942 he flew as co-pilot aboard the B-25 "Whirling Dervish" with Crew #9, completing the bombing run before the low-on-fuel crew bailed out over China. He returned home, recovered from malaria, and served on through the war before retiring in 1947 with numerous decorations.

Woodville, TX

Philip A. Work came to Texas in 1838 and represented Tyler County at the 1861 secession convention before raising Company F of Hood's famed Texas Brigade. As lieutenant colonel he commanded the Texans from 1862 to 1864, including at Sharpsburg (Antietam), where the brigade suffered over 82% casualties—among the greatest losses of any unit in the war. He led the Texas Brigade on the second day at Gettysburg and through the Confederate victory at Chickamauga in 1863 before returning home in failing health.

Albany, TX

Albany High School graduate William Edwin Dyess became one of the Pacific war's most consequential survivors. Captured when Bataan fell in 1942, he endured the Death March, escaped his captors a year later, and then did something rarer still — his firsthand published accounts of prisoner abuse reached the American public and shaped how the world understood the war in the Pacific. He died in a stateside P-38 crash weeks after a hero's visit to his hometown football field in 1943.

Albany, TX

Albany-born and Tarleton-educated, William Edwin Dyess trained as a pilot at Randolph Field and was leading the 21st Pursuit Squadron of P-40s in the Philippines when Japan struck in December 1941. His stubborn attacks at Subic Bay with almost no aircraft, his ordeal on the Bataan Death March, and his daring escape a year later made him a symbol of resistance. His Chicago Tribune accounts of Japanese atrocities altered world opinion, and his story inspired a book and an acclaimed play before his death in a 1943 crash.

Abilene, TX

This Abilene marker traces the arc of Albany native William Edwin Dyess from aviation cadet at Randolph Field to squadron commander in the Philippines, where he fought on despite crippling losses of aircraft. Taken prisoner at the fall of Bataan in 1942, he survived the Death March and prison camps, then escaped with eleven others in 1943 — reaching Australia by guerrilla contact and submarine. His accounts in the Chicago Tribune exposed conditions in Japanese camps before he died flying a new P-38 over Burbank late that year.

Galveston, TX

Edward Lea, a Maryland-born Naval Academy graduate, stayed loyal to the Union at the Civil War's outbreak despite his father Albert's urging him to join the Confederacy. As first officer of the U.S.S. Harriet Lane, he fought in the Battle of Galveston on New Year's Day 1863 against Confederate forces whose commander's staff included his own father. Mortally wounded, Edward is said to have spoken his last words — 'My father is here' — as Albert reached his dying son on the deck.

Killeen, TX

Born in St. Louis in 1894 and a 1916 graduate of Texas A&M, Andrew Davis Bruce began 37 years of military service in 1917, rising to lieutenant colonel at age 24 in France during World War I. Asked to create the Army's tank destroyer center, he chose Killeen in 1942 for its terrain and climate and named the camp for Confederate general John Bell Hood, giving rise to Fort Hood. In World War II he led the 77th Infantry Division through Guam, Leyte, Ie Shima, and Okinawa, earning two Distinguished Service Crosses, before a later career as president and chancellor of the University of Houston.

Marshall, TX

Born in Marshall in 1872, George Perry Rains earned a medical degree, then enlisted in the local Marshall Light Infantry in 1890 and spent nearly half a century in uniform. He served on the Mexican border and rose during World War I as a colonel commanding the 144th Infantry within the 36th Division. Honored as both physician and soldier, he ended a 49-year career at the rank of brevet lieutenant general.

Del Rio, TX

Born in Del Rio in 1914, Jack Thomas Laughlin graduated from the local high school and the University of Texas before joining the Army Air Corps in 1940 and earning his wings in California. On January 29, 1942, his B-17 Flying Fortress was shot down over the Java Sea, making him the first Del Rio-born pilot killed in World War II. When the Army built an airfield in town that year, citizens successfully petitioned to name it in his honor.

Lubbock, TX

Clyde Trusty opened the Lubbock Cotton Club in a renovated army quonset hut in 1938, and it quickly grew into one of west Texas's largest dance floors, big enough for 1,600 revelers. Western swing king Bob Wills played early, and under later owner Ralph Lowe the club drew national acts including Elvis Presley—who met Buddy Holly there in 1955—along with African American artists such as Charles Brown. Fire destroyed the original building in 1958, but the club carried on elsewhere until 1980.

Lubbock, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1891, Lubbock County honors Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock (1817-1862), a soldier of the Texas Revolution and Republic. Lubbock marched with the New Orleans Greys at the storming of Bexar, joined the ill-fated Santa Fe and Somervell expeditions, and in 1861 helped organize the famous Terry's Texas Rangers before his death. The county he named became the anchor of the South Plains.

Lubbock, TX

As Lubbock boomed in the 1920s into the agricultural and trade center of the South Plains, it needed a school to match, and Lubbock High School rose to meet the demand. Designed by the local firm of Peters, Strange and Bradshaw and completed in 1931 despite the onset of the Great Depression, the building is a striking example of North Italian Romanesque architecture, with decorative brickwork, terra cotta ornament, and a campanile bell tower. It has long been a community landmark and the training ground for many of Lubbock's civic leaders.

Lubbock, TX

Beginning in 1944, women's organizations across Lubbock joined forces to coordinate their community work, and in 1945 twenty-two groups chartered the Lubbock Women's Club. After meeting in homes and at Texas Technological College, the club bought the former Plains Funeral Home in 1949—a 1941 brick building with a full-façade porch and Doric columns—as its permanent headquarters, expanding it as membership grew. The club has hosted its own and neighbors' events there ever since.

Lubbock, TX

Before 1903 the nearest cotton gins were more than 100 miles from Lubbock, so little cotton was grown locally. After trial crops in 1902–03 proved the plains could raise cotton, town co-founder Frank Wheelock led a public subscription that opened Lubbock's first gin in late 1904 — the machinery hauled in by wagon and eight horses over eight days. Other gins, compresses and cottonseed-oil plants soon followed, and by the 1920s the county was booming.

Canyon, TX

Bessie Lucille Parker came to the Texas Panhandle and, with her husband George Nance, built the Nance Hereford Ranch into a nationally known purebred cattle operation spread across thousands of acres. After George's death she ran the ranch herself, remarried, and became a world-traveling collector of rococo art and antiques, even building a Canyon home designed room by room around her collection. Late in life she gave generously—art and antiques to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum and more than 2,000 acres, including the ranch headquarters, to West Texas State University for agricultural education.

Luckenbach, TX

In the 1850s members of the Luckenbach family and other German immigrants left nearby Fredericksburg to settle along Grape Creek, quickly founding a school and a short-lived post office. When the post office was re-established in 1886, the community took the Luckenbach name. More than a century later, in 1970, John Russell "Hondo" Crouch and friends bought the town center and turned its sleepy, rustic charm into something of a legend.

Luckenbach, TX

In 1855 pioneer settler Peter Pehl deeded two acres here for a schoolhouse to serve the Luckenbach district, and Herman Toepperwein taught the first classes in a log building. That structure served until 1905, when the present native-limestone schoolhouse was completed. The Luckenbach School kept its doors open until 1964, when it consolidated with the Fredericksburg district.

Round Top, TX

German immigrant Ludwig Giese landed at Galveston in 1850 and settled in Fayette County, working as a teamster and farmer. After serving the Confederacy in the Civil War, he bought a Haw Creek farmstead in the 1870s that included this German Vernacular house, distinguished by its stone piers, full-length porch, and infilled dogtrot. He and his wife, Caroline, raised ten children here, and the home remained in the family into the 21st century.

Fredericksburg, TX

Ludwig "Louis" Doebbler and his brother Wilhelm left Prussia for Texas in 1852, with Ludwig's family following the next year. Around 1857 he and his son Richard raised the first part of this home—a single-story limestone room just twelve by forty feet—then expanded it between 1865 and 1874 into a story-and-a-half L-plan house. The homestead, with its smokehouse, barn, and chicken house on 160 acres, stayed in the Doebbler family until 2004.

Comfort, TX

Ludwig Hein came to Texas from Germany in 1877, married Rosa Treiber of Waring, and built this Victorian home in Comfort before 1900, running a blacksmith shop next door until the family moved to San Antonio in 1914. From 1923 to 1955 the house earned the nickname "nerve center" of Comfort, when the town's telephone switchboard operated inside it. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1987.

Brenham, TX

In 1849, Ludwig and Carolyn Lehmann left Hamburg for the Texas coast with their sons and Ludwig's aged mother, who died on the grueling three-month Atlantic crossing and was buried at sea. Settling near Brenham, the family farmed and helped anchor the German Lutheran community of Berlin, donating land for its Ebenezer Evangelical Lutheran Church. This burial ground holds the first family members laid to rest in their adopted country, and the German-ordered grave markers a son later commissioned still speak to ties never fully cut.

San Antonio, TX

Born in the German region of Mecklenburg in 1846, Ludwig Mahncke emigrated in 1882 and became a popular San Antonio hotelier, restaurateur, city councilman, and parks commissioner. He persuaded philanthropist George Brackenridge to donate the land that became Brackenridge Park and then built its first roads, deer preserve, and menagerie. Cypress trees he transplanted still line the San Antonio River, and after his death in 1906 a bust and a park were dedicated in his honor.

Lueders, TX

The town of Lueders rose along the Clear Fork of the Brazos on land granted to the heirs of Frederick Luders, a German immigrant who fought at San Jacinto. Ranching gave way to a boom in 1900 when limestone quarries opened and the Texas Central Railroad reached the new townsite. Because thick limestone made grave-digging impractical at an earlier site, landowners donated ground for this cemetery in 1907; for years pallbearers carried caskets over the adjacent railroad embankment to reach the plots.

Lufkin, TX

Established near Lufkin from 1933 to 1942 and run by the Texas Forest Service, this was one of the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program Franklin Roosevelt created to put young men to work during the Great Depression. The corpsmen built roads and bridges, strung telephone lines, and planted trees. Beyond relieving unemployment, the camp's progressive forestry techniques helped revive the East Texas timber industry.

Lufkin, TX

First noted in 1907 as a "right newsy little sheet," the Lufkin Daily News grew from a Chicago transplant's one-man venture into a daily paper that mechanized typesetting in 1915 with a Mergenthaler Linotype. In 1940 it printed a record 288-page edition on the first commercially produced southern-pine newsprint in the world, made at nearby Southland Paper Mills. The paper computerized in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1977.

Lufkin, TX

Chartered in 1902 as a repair shop and parts house for the East Texas sawmills, the Lufkin Foundry & Machine Company was founded by J.H. Kurth, the Kavanaughs, Eli Wiener, and Simon Henderson. Under W.C. Trout the firm moved into the booming oil industry and built the first enclosed geared pumping unit; Trout's 1926 patent for a counterbalanced crank made the company's name known worldwide. By 1939 it had added industrial gears and truck trailers to its lines.

Lufkin, TX

In 1898 two Lufkin friends, Dr. Alexander Denman and Judge Edwin Mantooth, strung a telephone wire between their offices—and the novelty proved so popular they soon formed the Lufkin Telephone Exchange with partner Eli Wiener. Long-distance service followed in 1908, and the company grew alongside the technology itself, eventually absorbing exchanges across much of East Texas before its 1985 reorganization.

Socorro, TX

This Spanish-language marker recounts how the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico drove Spanish colonists and allied Indians south to the El Paso del Norte region, where the Franciscans founded Mission Santa Maria de Socorro del Sur. By 1691 a permanent adobe church stood here beside a Piro Indian pueblo, serving a settlement of Spaniards, Piros, Tano and Jemez peoples until floods destroyed it in the 1740s. Archeological work in the 1980s identified it as the oldest known mission site in Texas.

Liberty, TX

Louisiana-born Luke Bryan enlisted in the Army of Texas in 1835 and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, the eighteen-minute clash in 1836 that won Texas its independence. This marker, erected by the State of Texas in 1936 for the revolution's centennial, honors his service among the ordinary soldiers who secured the Republic.

Bay City, TX

In 1910 Casper Lukefahr brought his family from Nebraska to the Matagorda County coast and donated land for a neighborhood school that took his name. Like countless one- and two-room rural schools of its era, the building doubled as the community's church, revival ground, and social hall. When Texas counties consolidated their scattered common school districts by 1939, the schoolhouse closed and the little community around it faded.

Crockett, TX

Born in the Wheeler Springs community in 1878, Lula Demby earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Prairie View College and came home to teach, becoming principal of the two-room, eight-grade Wheeler Springs School. She worked tirelessly to widen her students' opportunities and, beyond the classroom, helped her community build a canning kitchen, a garden, and a school cafeteria. She lived to ninety-eight and was buried in the family cemetery.

Corpus Christi, TX

On February 17, 1929, delegates gathered in Corpus Christi's Obreros Hall to merge three Texas organizations into the League of United Latin American Citizens — LULAC. Corpus Christi businessman Ben Garza chaired the founding meeting and was elected the new group's first president at its convention that May. From these local roots LULAC grew into one of the most influential civil rights organizations of the twentieth century, pioneering educational, social, and legal programs for Hispanic Americans nationwide.

Hillsboro, TX

When the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad reached Hill County in 1881, Hillsboro boomed, and in 1883 a local contractor built this handsome residence for R. S. Lumpkin, the town's first saddle and harness maker. A Confederate veteran, horse fancier, and volunteer fireman, Lumpkin embodied the enterprising spirit of the railroad-era town, and his home's style reflected his success. Later owners included a family of merchants who kept the house through the mid-twentieth century.

Meridian, TX

South Carolina native Dr. James J. Lumpkin settled in Meridian in 1878, building a medical practice, pharmacy, and considerable landholdings. With his wife Ida Etoile Fuller he became a civic leader and benefactor, and the couple's 1898 home—marked by an octagonal Eastlake corner tower—became a center of the town's social life. After their deaths the residence passed to Mrs. Lumpkin's cousin, Frank Woodruff.

Elgin, TX

First called Pleasant Hill, this Travis County community was settled by Swedish immigrants in the late 1880s and later renamed Lund after a city in southern Sweden. Under the Rev. J.A. Stamline, its Swedish Evangelical Bethlehem Lutheran Church was founded in 1897, anchoring a settlement of farms, cotton gins, a general store, a blacksmith, a post office, and a school. A tornado destroyed the church in 1980, and a new one was dedicated the following year.

Waco, TX

In the years just after the Civil War, Waco was growing from a Brazos River crossing into a bustling Central Texas town. This home, raised in 1866 by a Confederate captain, later passed to his widow and her second husband, a pioneering Waco physician and businessman who lived here into the 1920s. The Franciscan Fathers then acquired the property for use as a monastery.

Orange, TX

In 1877 H. J. Lutcher and G. B. Moore moved their lumber operations from Pennsylvania to Orange and built one of the great timber empires of the Gulf South. Over the following decades their company spread across Texas and Louisiana with a web of sawmills, railroads, canals, warehouses, docks, and transport ships, erecting a mission-style headquarters here in 1913. The fortunes made by Lutcher and Moore and their successors, the Brown and Stark families, seeded many of Orange County's lasting cultural institutions before operations wound down in the early 1930s.

Orange, TX

Orange's First Presbyterian Church, founded in 1878, worshiped in a modest frame building until 1912, when it moved into this richly appointed sanctuary given by Frances Ann Lutcher, whose husband H. J. Lutcher had built a fortune in the Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company. She asked that the building's cost never be made public and endowed its upkeep, sparing no expense: art-glass windows from Lamb Studios of New York, three prize windows from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Italian marble, Llano granite, gold-leaf decoration, and mahogany woodwork. The result is one of Southeast Texas' most lavish houses of worship.

Austin, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression, the congregation of Austin's Gethsemane Lutheran Church answered their pastor's 1934 call for a dedicated space to teach the young and gather the faithful. Completed in 1940, the building married solid craftsmanship — polychromatic brick, Cordova limestone, and a carved Luther Rose — to a practical dual purpose: classrooms above and an open first floor that soon welcomed World War II servicemen for concerts, dinners, and dances. When the congregation relocated in 1961, the State of Texas took over the hall for agency offices, giving the old church building a second civic life.

Palacios, TX

Originally the Palacios Hotel, this seaside landmark was built in 1903 on the East Bay front and moved to its present site in 1905, where it was enlarged into a genuine resort. It welcomed Northern investors coming south to buy orchards and coastal land, offering a fine dining room and a resident orchestra. It has weathered many Gulf storms, including the devastating Hurricane Carla in 1961.

Belton, TX

Luther Memorial honors the earliest days of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, which began in 1845 at Independence as Baylor University's female department and moved to Belton in 1886 as Baylor Female College under president John Hill Luther. The first building here—a limestone structure with Victorian towers and arches, later named Luther Hall—burned in a 1929 fire that displaced more than 200 students without injury. Its charred ruins served as a backdrop for pageants and commencements until, beginning in 1954, its original limestone blocks and arches were incorporated into the memorial dedicated in 1955.

Taylor, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1784, Luther Stearns spent his life pushing westward, living on the frontier of four states before settling in newly formed Williamson County, Texas, in 1848. Two years later he bought 650 acres along the San Gabriel River, raised a story-and-a-half log home, and farmed the land until his death in 1859. He was buried in a family cemetery that vanished in the early twentieth century.

San Antonio, TX

Born in Houston, Lydia Mendoza became one of the earliest and most beloved voices of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her 1934 recording of "Mal Hombre" launched a sixty-year career built on her powerful voice and her mastery of the twelve-string guitar. Known as "La Alondra de la Frontera," she performed at President Carter's inauguration and earned the National Medal of Arts before a stroke ended her career in 1988.

Lyford, TX

This corner of the Willacy County brushland was once King Ranch pasture nicknamed "Como se Llama" before Rock Island Railroad executives developed the townsite in 1907, naming it for Illinois attorney William H. Lyford. Midwestern settlers arrived by train and camped in tents until homes could be built, drawing water from an artesian well and worshiping and schooling in "Pioneer Hall." Soldiers and Texas Rangers guarded the young town through the border bandit raids of 1913-15.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Lyles-Sanders Cemetery began in 1860 with the burial of infant Susan Lyles, serving the Lyles and Sanders families before opening by 1899 to neighboring communities such as Iron Mountain, Gould, and Oak Flat. Formally donated for cemetery use in 1923 and enlarged in 1977, it holds veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War beneath vertical stones, obelisks, and a Woodmen of the World monument. It remains an active burial ground and a record of southern Rusk County's pioneers.

Baytown, TX

Nathaniel Lynch, one of Stephen F. Austin's first colonists, established a ferry here before 1824 on land granted that August, and in 1830 the ayuntamiento of San Felipe gave him the exclusive right to operate it. Sitting where Buffalo Bayou meets the San Jacinto River, the crossing became a vital artery for the colonists of early Anglo Texas and lay near the ground where independence would be won in 1836. Still running today as the Lynchburg Ferry, it is among the oldest continuously operating crossings in the state.

Lynchburg, TX

Founded in 1822 by Nathaniel Lynch near the meeting of the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou, the Lynchburg ferry is one of the oldest continuously operating crossings in Texas. Lynch's family ran it until 1848, after which a succession of operators guided it through fires and storms that hastened the town's decline, until Harris County bought the service in 1888. Motorized boats followed in the 20th century, and the ferry still shuttles workers across the Houston Ship Channel today.

Alto, TX

Methodists gathered in this corner of Cherokee County by 1860, when the first records name the Rev. J. A. Srugs as pastor of a congregation long nicknamed "Blackjack" for the grove of blackjack oaks nearby. It later took the name Lynches Chapel to honor the Rev. Samuel Lynch, who died while serving there. The sanctuary doubled as a schoolhouse for years, taught by pioneer families like the Blacks, and the adjoining cemetery, begun in 1885, holds settlers named Landrum, Wallace, and Moffett.

Throckmorton, TX

In October 1886, 19-year-old Tom Farrar, one of several African American cowboys working area ranches, was arrested after two bodies were found at a dugout he had stopped at, identified by a distinctive horseshoe print. Held in the local jail, he was seized during the night by a mob of dozens of men, dragged behind a horse, and hanged from an elm on the nearby creek. In the aftermath, African Americans all but vanished from Throckmorton County for generations.

Johnson City, TX

By the 1930s cities across America enjoyed electricity while most of the rural Texas Hill Country remained in the dark, its sparse population failing to qualify for New Deal aid. In 1937 newly elected congressman Lyndon B. Johnson pressed President Roosevelt and federal agencies to bend the Rural Electrification Administration's rules, focusing on power from the Buchanan and Marshall Ford dams. With rancher E. Babe Smith helping sign up families, the Pedernales Electric Cooperative won the largest REA loan ever made, and in the fall of 1939 the lights came on.

Stonewall, TX

On this Hill Country farmstead near the Pedernales River, Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in a modest house his neighbors had helped raise two years earlier. He came from hardy Texas stock—Johnsons and Baineses who had been ministers, teachers, ranchers, and frontier settlers, including his father, a state legislator. Johnson went on to become the 36th President, and later rebuilt the original house after it burned.

Stonewall, TX

As a twelve-year-old, the future 36th President attended eighth-grade classes at the old Stonewall school from October 1920 to June 1921. The one-year stint places young Lyndon Baines Johnson in the small Hill Country schoolhouses that shaped his early years before his rise through Texas and national politics.