Pioneer Farms
Jourdan Homestead - 1871
The Homestead or "Old Home Place" shows the lifestyle of a middle-class Texas family working their own piece of land. The farm might have 250 acres - bought 30 to 40 years earlier from those had claimed the land, made a few improvements and cashed in on their investment.
Frederic Jourdan and his wife, Harriet Bachman, are a typical story: They settled this land in 1858 with eight young children and nine slaves. The Jourdans eventually acquired 2,000 acres of Blackland Prairie along Walnut Creek where they raised 12 children, and grew cotton, wheat and corn.
They led simple lives. Their daily activities revolved around tending to crops, livestock and family needs. Members of the family were assigned daily chores. Buildings were constructed with local materials such as cedar logs, limestone rocks and clay. Post and rail fences surround livestock pens, and hogs, cows and mules or horses were the primary livestock.
This homestead is typical of many in mid to late 1800s Texas.
Sources: "Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go," Pioneer Farms Archives.
Built of cedar around 1858 by Frederic and Harriet Jourdan's slaves, this cabin is the original homestead on this property. It originally served as a corn crib used to store animal feed and was later remodeled and expanded for use as a home, most likely after the loss of the family's home to a fire or tornado.
Jourdan (1815-1881) bought this property in 1858 from Lt. James O. Rice, a Texas Ranger who homesteaded it in 1844, a year before statehood, while Texas was still a republic. Jourdan had arrived in Texas in 1839 and, after several moves, he and his family eventually landed on this site after a flood downstream.
With a large front porch and "dog trot" or breezeway, which created a wind tunnel through the house that could lower temperatures by as much as 10 degrees during the summer, this cabin was of a design common in Texas throughout the mid to late-19th Century. The log cabin features two additions: a kitchen, added in the 1880s with a "modern" wood cook stove, and a shed room added sometime before then as a child"s bedroom. Older children slept in an upstairs loft.
Sources: Austin History Center, Pioneer Farms Archives.