Sauer-Beckmann Farm

Historic Site
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1885-1966
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Yes
Yes
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Gillespie

The Sauer-Beckmann Farm house.
The Sauer-Beckmann Farm house.
Making a living on a farm is hard enough these days. One gets the impression it couldn't have been any easier in the past when visiting the Sauer-Beckmann Farm on the grounds of the Lyndon B. Johnson State Park. Here a cluster of buildings functions as a living farm where volunteers in period costumes carry on their chores exactly as they would have done 100 years ago.

German immigrants Johann and Christine Sauer settled here in 1869. The Sauers undoubtedly knew the Johnson family across the river since Augusta Sauer Lindig was the midwife for LBJ's birth! The Beckmann family acquired the property in 1900 and eventually constructed most of the buildings seen here today. In 1966 Edna Beckmann Hightower sold the site to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

The barn was constructed in or around 1915.
The barn was constructed in or around 1915.
The Victorian-style house porches was built by the Beckmann's after a bountiful cotton crop in 1915. The stone and log buildings next to it predate the Beckmann's and were built by the Sauer's as they built up the homestead in the 1800's.

Real meals are prepared just as they were 100 years ago with ingredients mostly grown and harvested at the farm.
Real meals are prepared just as they were 100 years ago with ingredients mostly grown and harvested at the farm.
Cheesy westerns and Little House on the Prairie re-runs do little to give one a real appreciation for the hard work and ingenuity displayed by pioneers and farmers long ago. Living farms attempt to show things the way they really were complete with sights, sounds and smells. Watch someone making cheese, feeding the chickens, preserving meat, shoeing a mule, milking cows, gathering eggs, churning butter or plowing the garden.

How did people stay cool during hot Texas summers before the advent of air conditioning? At a living farm one can get a tactile appreciation for dogtrots and wide porches. Without freezers or refrigerators, how does one preserve meats? Try storing them in vats of lard. Sound tough? It was but, with tenacity, pioneers and farmers persevered and prospered.

The Danz cabin predates the Sauer-Beckmann farm.
The Danz cabin predates the Sauer-Beckmann farm.
Also nearby, within the boundaries of the park, are some historic structures on what was once the Danz family. The Danz cabin was built in 1860 and features a prominent dogtrot between the two halves of the structure. A second cabin was not part of the Danz homestead, but moved here in 1974 and placed on top of the stone cellar that is believed to have been the foundation for the Danz's first cabin.

Photos
Animals
Sheep, turkey and chickens enjoy the shade behind the farm house. Note the chickens resting on top of the sheep. (Photo by Austin Explorer)
Log Entries

No logs have been entered for this location.

Recommended Item
Recommended Item Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President
Robert Dallek
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Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents." Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage. Read more