The president's grandfather ran the largest trail driving outfit in Blanco and six neighbouring counties from a 960 acre homestead on the Pedernales, and he lost it. Between 1867 and 1871 Sam Ealy Johnson Senior and his brother Tom sent several herds of two and a half to three thousand longhorns a season up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, working pens at Williamson's Creek and Deer Creek. In 1870 they came back with a hundred thousand dollars in gold coins. Then the market collapsed under the weight of too many cattle, and the National Park Service dates their departure to 1871 in one account and to bankruptcy in 1872 in another. Tom Johnson drowned at a river crossing in 1877. The dogtrot cabin at the centre of the place is older than the cattle business.
Its west wing went up in 1856 and Sam Johnson added the east wing around 1868, and the family lived in it for five years, a day's ride from the nearest store at Blanco. What else survives belongs to the people who came after: a stone barn built in 1884 by John Bruckner, a German immigrant who had bought the property from James Polk Johnson two years earlier, and a cooler house and windmill that the Park Service attributes on one page to James Polk Johnson and on another to a cousin by marriage.
The town is named for James Polk Johnson, who founded it in 1879, and who was the president's grandfather's nephew rather than any ancestor of his. Three sites were offered at a barbecue that Fourth of July and his was chosen, so he did not donate the ground so much as win a contest for it. He had taken the cattle business over from his uncles in 1871, and prospered at it for the fourteen years left to him.
Getting there
30.2742, -98.4167
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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