LBJ Ranch tours to include home

STONEWALL, Texas - Shaded by a massive, 400-year-old oak and perched above the rippling waters of the Pedernales River, it was known as the Texas White House.

President Lyndon Johnson served barbecue to world dignitaries at the ranch in the rolling hill country 70 miles west of Austin, and Lady Bird Johnson lived there for three decades after her husband died.

With her death Wednesday at age 94, the National Park Service will soon take over the 4,000-square-foot stone-and-wood home on the historic LBJ Ranch, near the town of Stonewall.

While much of the ranch is already open to the public - with tours that drive buses through the property and allow visitors to walk up to the cemetery - the main home, a rambling, 28-room building with eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms, was off-limits during Lady Bird Johnson's life.

Purchased by then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson from his aunt in 1951, the home became known as the Texas White House during his presidency when he used it as a refuge from Washington.

Like President Bush at his ranch in Crawford about 100 miles to the northeast, Johnson hosted foreign heads of state. He held staff meetings in the yard under the shade of the giant oak.

Lady Bird Johnson called the property "heart's home."

"It was always Lyndon's favorite time, particularly around sunset, from the earliest spring until cold weather drove us in," she once said.

In 1965, she seemed to sense it would become a key part of the Johnson legacy, when she commented on her impressions after a visit to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

"I did find myself looking at the house with new eyes, the eyes of someone who someday might leave a simple house - not anything so great in our history as Monticello, but one to which other generations of American tourists might come," she said.

In December 1972, the Johnsons gave the LBJ Ranch house and hundreds of acres of land to the public as a national historic site.

The Johnson family will be given time to move out belongings before officials begin preparing the home for public tours.