National Confederate Soldiers Home

It began today, in 1884, in a seven-room house on sixteen acres at 1600 West Sixth Street in Austin. Five years later its backers were soliciting money from Union veterans to run it for the remaining 34 of the 113 veterans that had since occupied the house and an adjoining tent. The state took it over in 1891 and expanded it to twenty-six acres to include a hospital and cottages. Along the way it also housed impoverished veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The last Confederate there died in 1954, age 108. The home was effectively closed in 1963.