College on the Hill: LBJ & Texas State

Lyndon Baines Johnson is the only U.S. president schooled entirely in Texas, and the school was here — Southwest Texas State Teachers College, on the hill above San Marcos, now Texas State University. Johnson arrived in 1927 as a broke farm kid, swept floors and ran errands as a janitor and office assistant, edited the campus paper, joined the debate team, and took a year off to teach poor Mexican American children in Cotulla before coming back to graduate in 1930 — an experience he said he never forgot when he later pushed civil rights and education laws through Congress. This driving tour climbs College Hill to Old Main, the museum that tells LBJ's San Marcos story, the university's great literary archive, and the older institutions that made this a college town in the first place.