John Blackburn Log House

The Blackburn cabin was built in the dog-run style, two equal halves with an open breezeway between them, so called because dogs slept there in summer. What stands here is one half only. The Clio guide to Killeen says that half survived ninety years of habitation and abandonment, and that the rebuilt cabin includes some logs from the half that was lost. A photograph in an Arcadia history of Killeen shows Mary Ann Blackburn at its door around 1900, with the stone chimney and the chinking between the logs still visible.

What the plaque says

John Blackburn Log House John Churchill Gaines Blackburn (1832-1912) was born in Tennessee and came to Texas in 1853. He and his wife Mary Ann Chambers Blackburn (1831-1908) first stopped with other family members in Williamson County, then moved to Bell County in 1854. Blackburn's father, John Porter Blackburn (1786-1855), had previously established claims in Texas, including land in this county near the Palo Alto Community (then about 4 mi.ne). There John C.G. Blackburn established a 30-acre farm. He enlisted in the Confederate State Militia in 1861 when the Civil War began. Blackburn built this oak-log structure in 1863, according to family tradition, just before enlisting in the Confederate Cavalry. He was then assigned to frontier duty along the Rio Grande for the duration of the war. The Blackburns built a larger house at Palo Alto in 1883. This structure survived at its original site until 1954, when a Fort Hood expansion prompted its removal to Westcliff Road in Killeen (2 mi.NE). It remained there until 1976, when the cabin was moved here and rebuilt as an artifact of frontier life in Bell County. John C.G. and Mary Ann Blackburn are buried at the Blackburn Cemetery near their homestead on Old Schwald Road (about 4 mi. NE on Fort Hood property). Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 21 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 22 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.

More markers nearby

• City of Killeen — 0.5 mi
• Santa Fe Depot — 1.2 mi
• Oveta Culp Hobby and the Women's Army Corps — 1.5 mi
• Killeen Herald — 1.7 mi