Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park

Lyndon Johnson's national historical park has two districts 14 miles apart on US-290. This is the Johnson City one, in the town that grew up on the land of James Polk Johnson, a relative, in the late 1870s and became Blanco County's seat in 1890.

Lyndon was born near Stonewall in 1908, and in 1913 his parents, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines Johnson, moved the family here. Their house, built in 1886, is modest and Victorian. It stayed Lyndon's official residence until he married Claudia Alta Taylor in 1934, and in 1937 he gave the first speech of his race for Congress from its east porch. He graduated from high school in Johnson City in 1924. The house opened as a museum in 1965 and is shown on guided tours that begin at the visitor center at 10 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 2 p.m.

West of the house, a one-mile trail leads through the Johnson Settlement, where the president's grandparents lived in the 1860s and where his grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson Sr. and great-uncle Tom built the stone barns that still stand. The park was established by Congress in 1969, after Johnson gave the nation his lands, and took its present name in 1980. The LBJ Ranch district is reached with a free permit from the neighboring state park.