Sam E. Johnson Sr. House

The Sam Ealy Johnson Sr. House

NPS Photo / Jack Burton

Quick Facts

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

The scene was a common one: young Lyndon Johnson, only a few years old, toddling down the road to visit his grandparents in this house. Here he found a ready supply of apples, candy, and affection. The future president felt a powerful attraction to his paternal grandparents, Sam Johnson Sr. and Eliza Bunton Johnson; he would always identify himself with the frontier struggles they had endured.

Sam and Eliza Johnson were among the first and most successful Hill Country cattle drovers, settling near what is now Johnson City in the late 1860s. After amassing a fortune, they lost it, and eventually resettled here along the Pedernales, where, Eliza Johnson remembered, "the tempo of life was slower." Sam lived here until his death in 1915. Eliza lived here until 1917. Both are buried in the Johnson family cemetery.