Lyndon Johnson has been called “the last of our frontier presidents” and that doesn’t miss the mark by much. He wasn’t born in a log cabin in the early 1800s, ala Abraham Lincoln, but in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River in 1908. His grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr., bought land along the Pedernales River in 1882 and settled there with his wife, Eliza and lived the life that was being lived in that time and place. 

Sam partnered with his brother Tom in a cattle operation after the Civil War. The war had greatly increased the number of unattended cattle running loose all over the state at a time when a steer worth $6 to $10 in Texas was bringing $30-$40 in Kansas City. The Johnson brothers commenced running cattle to Kansas and cashing in on the bonanza. 

The future president grew up listening to stories from his grandfather about the rewards and perils of trailing an unruly herd of longhorns north along the Chisholm Trail, of stampedes and dangerous river crossings and rowdy cowtowns. He heard how his grandmother, Eliza, was alone in the house with an infant one day when the Comanches came calling. She stuffed a handkerchief in the baby’s mouth to keep its cries from being heard and hid under a trap door while the marauders ransacked the house above. 

His grandfather died not long after Lyndon and his family moved to Johnson City, where the future president lived until he left to attend college in San Marcos. Johnson ran for Congress in 1937 to fill the 10th Congressional seat left vacant by the death of James Buchanan.

 Running on the promise to harness energy from dams being built in the Hill Country to provide electricity to that region, he defeated nine other candidates in a hotly contested primary. His was a winning issue because, without electricity, even boiling water was hard work. 

Pioneer families— usually the women— hauled water by hand from a well or creek and carried it to the house in buckets. It took about 40 gallons of water a day to run a farm, which meant a lot of trips from the well to the house. Lyndon’s reluctance to help his mother with pumping and hauling water was a source of constant friction between Lyndon and his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. 

To boil the water, somebody had to cut the wood and haul it to the house. The wood-burning stoves of the day that were notoriously slow to “start up” and prone to covering the inside of the house in soot and ash. The stoves made the house feel like a furnace, especially in the middle of an already heat-brutal summer. 

The stoves had to be lit not only to boil water but also for cooking and canning. At least twice a day during canning, the ash container had to be wrestled outside, emptied and brought back. The women spent most of the day either bending down to the flames or standing over them. 

Laundry was a year-round job. The clothes were washed outside where a huge vat of boiling water was suspended over another fire. Clothes were scrubbed in one tub with handmade lye soap and swished around by means of a broomstick or paddle. 

From there the clothes went into a rinse tub and from there to a bluing pan and then to the starching, which completed one of what was usually four or so loads a week. The tubs had to be changed too, which required another eight or so gallons of water. 

Many of the Hill Country women that Johnson biographer Robert Caro talked to told him that of all the chores that befell them, ironing was the most onerous. 

“Washing was hard work, but ironing was the worst,” one woman said. “Nothing could ever be as hard as ironing.”

Wielding an iron in those days meant tossing around six or seven-pound wedges of iron, often without handles. The irons had to be heated over a fire, where soot sometimes accumulated and, despite every effort, sent another garment back to the original washing tub. Also despite every precaution, women scorched their hands from time to time, which didn’t excuse them from hauling six and seven-pound loads of clothes around all day. 

“The women of the Hill Country never called the instruments they used every Tuesday irons; they called them ‘sad irons’” Caro wrote.

Life was like that for people in the country because, in the 1930s, only 2.3 percent of the farms in Texas had electricity. Thirty years later, only two percent were without it, and Lyndon Johnson was the U.S. President.