John Nance Garner came to Uvalde as a young lawyer in the early 1890s, was appointed county judge, and in 1893 ran for the full term against Mariette Rheiner, whom he married two years later. He went to the legislature and then, in 1903, to Congress, where he served fifteen terms and became speaker in 1931. He said almost nothing in the House for years, gathering friends and seniority instead. In 1932 he released his delegates to Franklin Roosevelt and became his vice president, the administration's broker with Congress through the first New Deal, holding court in the evenings in what he called his Board of Education. He broke with Roosevelt over a third term and came home in 1941.
He spent the rest of his long life in Uvalde. In the late 1940s Ettie Garner burned his public and private papers, leaving only his scrapbooks. He died on November 7, 1967, days short of his ninety-ninth birthday. The 1920 house was his home for more than thirty years and is a National Historic Landmark.
The museum also tells the story of Dolph Briscoe Jr., born in Uvalde in 1923, a rancher who led the campaign against screwworm as head of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Briscoe was Garner's protege, served in the Texas House from 1949 to 1957, and was governor from 1973 to 1979, elected in the wake of the Sharpstown scandal. The house belongs to the University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center for American History, and admission is free.
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