Road Trip to the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas By Barbara Redding
LBJ’s beloved ranch is one of the only presidential sites that take visitors from “the cradle to the grave site.”
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tretching along the fertile Pedernales River Valley in the Hill Country of Central Texas, Stonewall is a quiet community of cattle ranches, peach orchards, and vineyards.
Its best-known resident was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th U.S. president whose ranch became the “Texas White House” in the 1960s. Though Texas has claimed two presidents since then—George H.W. and George W. Bush —Johnson is the only one who was born and who died in Texas. Presidential history was far from my mind when I set off from Austin on a 60-mile road trip west to the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Stonewall on a searing hot August day. After five months of coronavirus quarantining in my Austin bungalow, with its equally petite yard, I just wanted to escape to the country.
Subtle beauty of the ranch In the process, however, I rediscovered the subtle beauty
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