A good cotton crop in 1915 paid for the Victorian house at the Sauer-Beckmann farmstead, and the price of it is recorded: a thousand dollars, in a year when cotton went from nine cents a pound to twenty in a single month. Emil and Emma Beckmann used that money first to buy out Emil's brother Otto's share of the farm, then to put up a new barn, add a frame room onto the old rock structure, and build connecting porches and decorative pressed tin. Hermann Beckmann had bought the four hundred acres for his two sons in 1900, paying four thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, about eleven dollars an acre. Johann and Christine Sauer settled the land in 1869 with four of the ten children they eventually had, and by 1885 several stone buildings stood near their original rock and log cabins.
The family held it for sixty six years after the Beckmanns arrived, ninety seven in all counting the Sauers, until Edna Beckmann Hightower sold the site to Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1966.
After archeological survey and restoration it opened to the public in 1975, and what it does is unusual: the farm is worked rather than displayed. Interpreters in period clothing raise the crops, tend the animals, cook the meals, churn the butter and make the cheese through an actual working day, with canning, butchering and sheep shearing in their seasons. Parks and Wildlife dates the portrayal flatly to 1918, while its own magazine has put the interpreters in 1915 and the National Park Service calls it the turn of the century.
Getting there
30.2361, -98.6237
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
