The Neill-Cochran House Museum preserves and reflects the experience of some of Austin’s earliest residents.

Neill-Cochran House Museum

The Neill-Cochran House Museum preserves and reflects the experience of some of Austin’s earliest residents. Built in 1855 by renowned entrepreneur and builder Abner Cook, the house and the collections it displays shed light on the local, individual, and political history of our ever changing, perpetually growing, and always dynamic city. We tell Austin's story from its founding in 1839 up to 1930 through the many people who have lived and worked at the historic site — from the first State School for the Blind, to the Lieutenant Governor during the Civil War, to Federal soldiers recuperating from yellow fever — to the Neills and Cochrans.

Today, NCHM is host to weddings, receptions, meetings, workshops, formal dinners, & other special events

The house that Wash and Mary Hill commissioned 160 years ago has distinctive entertaining in its bones. NCHM is one of the very few antebellum venues in Austin for weddings, receptions, meetings, workshops, formal dinners, and other special events, and we’re proud of the historic, high-society charm that we bring to special events.

As an indoor venue for intimate weddings up to 50 or an outdoor venue for larger receptions and ceremonies up to 200, no other location in Austin can offer the same depth and historical charm.

Whether we’re hosting a wedding, a special free event, book signing, or open-house party, the 19th century architecture and period furnishings of this historic house lend something unique and irreplaceable. No exhibit, no matter how well conceived and executed, can give us the experience of socializing and enjoying ourselves in historical surroundings without actually allowing us to socialize and enjoy ourselves in those same surroundings. 

Just like the Neill family in the 1870s and 1880s, every once in a while, we pull out all the stops and open the museum for an out-of-the-ordinary event as a way to think our way back into the social uses that the house was designed for. Think we need to host your workshop, book signing, or talk?

Add some grandeur and historic charm to your next event!

A Historic Event Space

Welcome home! Learn about Austin's founding through 1930 through the former NCHM residents and staff.

The Neill-Cochran House offers its visitors an intimate view of the fabric of the lives of prominent Austinites and some of those who lived among them from the mid-19th through early 20th centuries.

Through the visual information of the historic architecture and the period-correct and frequently family-provenance furnishings and decorative arts, we catch glimpses of the changing styles of what we now might call Austin living. Further interpreting across a set of changing social and economic landscapes, we incorporate the individuals who lived at what is today 2310 San Gabriel in our re-telling of the first century of our city.

In 1855, a young land surveyor named Washington Hill commissioned local master builder, designer, and businessman Abner Cook to construct a fine Greek Revival house on nearly 18 acres of land northwest of the city of Austin.

Wash and his wife Mary were very much in good company; as Austin’s economy rapidly expanded after it once again became the capital of Texas in 1845, many prominent Texans found themselves in the market for finer residences in and around the city. However, the Hills’ ambitions exceeded their means, and despite their attempts to finance the project, they were unable to afford finishing the house, and, as a result, never lived a day at their suburban residence.

The first residents of the home were students and teachers of the Texas School for the Blind, a boarding school established by progressive Governor E. Marshall Pease. Pease also established the State Hospital for the Insane and the School for the Deaf during his tenure in the 1850s.  

Little is known about the way the house was used as a boarding school, but one imagines that the walls were unpainted plaster, and that all of the rooms were used as discrete spaces either as dormitories or as classrooms.

During the 1860s, Lieutenant Governor Fletcher Stockdale lived in the home.  Stockdale briefly served as Governor when the sitting Confederate Governor fled to Mexico at the end of the Civil War. Stockdale rode out of Austin to meet the invading forces under Colonel George Armstrong Custer to officially surrender Texas to the United States Army.

The site then served for over a year as a Federal War Hospital for soldiers recuperating from yellow fever and cholera, before once again functioning as a rental property until the Neills purchased the home in 1876.

Come home to the Neill-Cochran House Museum!

The NCHM grounds are a perfect place to picnic, stroll or just enjoy the shade.

The 1850 US Census declared there to be 3,500 people living in and around the City of Austin. Though the city was growing, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (most famous for later designing Central Park in New York) declared that the capital city of 1853 was home to “scatered [sic] cottages and one or two pretty dwellings,” as well as “a very remarkable number of drinking and gabling shops, but not one book-store.”

Taken within this context, the series of Greek Revival residences Abner Cook constructed in Austin in the 1850s represented an attempt to bring order to the wilderness, and to erect temples of culture and refinement. The Neill-Cochran House grounds as you see them today are not heavily embellished, nor were they in the nineteenth century. 

They were tasteful and provided opportunity for recreation out of doors, and originally were balanced between the ornamental and the useful. The grounds likely were host to a kitchen garden, and until the 1929 sale of the property to the north of the current site, it was home to a peach orchard.

The Neill-Cochran House Museum is an independent nonprofit and does not receive significant funding from government agencies. We depend on your enthusiasm and support to continue and expand our reach into the community.

Become a partner or sponsor of the Neill-Cochran House Museum. 

The Grounds

The foyer is the first stop at NCHM and an introduction to the inside of the house.

As an introduction to the house, the front hall is the best place to discover the history of The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America and their continued importance in preserving this Austin treasure.

The NSCDA was born on an April afternoon in 1891 when thirty women came together in Philadelphia to discuss the formation of an organization that paid tribute to the struggles and successes of their Colonial American ancestors. The Texas Society of the NSCDA incorporated in 1898. In its early years, the Texas members found themselves on the front line of state politics when they joined the debate over the selection of a State Flower.

The Dames took the part of the Bluebonnet, placing jars of the Texas wildflower on each legislator’s table, and carrying a painting by a local artist onto the floor of the legislature, on the day of the vote. The painting, Bluebonnets and Evening Primrose (c.1900) by Austin artist Mode Walker, today welcomes visitors to the Neill-Cochran House Museum from its place in the front hall.

In 1958, the NSCDA-TX purchased the Neill-Cochran house from Frankie Cochran Hill - daughter of Thomas and Bessie Cochran. The NSCDA-TX opened the house as a museum in 1962, and today the Dames continue to oversee the property and museum’s preservation, maintenance, and educational programming.

Front Hall

Formal and informal parlors replete with antebellum Austin furnishings.

Visitors will notice the distinctive double parlor, which may seem like an odd architectural quirk to modern home owners but was a common feature of American homes during the Victorian era. The way the house is curated now, the first floor is representative of the Neill's residency and of the Victorian era in general.

After a short period of ownership by C.W. Whitis, the Neill family purchased the house in 1876. Andrew, then 63, and his wife Jennie, having recently returned from the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, furnished the house with an impressive suite of walnut furniture and began to make a name for themselves in the social and political landscape of 1870s Austin. 

Neill, a lawyer and soldier native to Scotland, had previously been a Grand Master mason, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor, a captive of the Mexican army, and a late-arriving fighter at the battle of San Jacinto, fashioned his library (now installed as a French Parlor) as a destination for powerful men of his day, while the cellar became renowned for the fine wines and foods that would come out of it during the family’s many lavish parties.

Jennie Neill and her relations, perhaps most notably Pearl Cashell Jackson (1869-1928), an early alumna of the University of Texas who would go on to become president of the Texas Women’s Press Association (now the Press Women of Texas), remained in the house until 1892. When Jennie “moved to town,” she leased the house to Thomas and Bessie Cochran thus beginning the Cochran era that is explored in great detail in the upstairs of the home.

Double Parlor

The Dependency is interpreted as a late nineteenth-century work space and living quarters.

The term “dependency” applies to any secondary structure on a property.  Barns, workshops, privies, kitchens, and other support buildings all could be called dependencies. The origin of the term is not known, but could refer either to the fact that without a primary building, none of the secondary structures would be necessary (they are thus dependent on the primary building). In contrast, the term may reflect the fact that the primary building – the historic Neill-Cochran House in this case – could not have functioned without its secondary structures, and therefore was itself dependent on them.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Neill-Cochran House had several dependencies, including a barn (on the site of the current Carriage House), a privy, a kitchen (where our modern gift shop is today), and this workshop and living space structure. It is thought that this building might pre-date the Neill-Cochran House itself. If so, then the team of enslaved laborers who built the main house built this structure first and likely lived in it while building the main residence.

The basic structural design of this building mirrors that of the main building, with rubble limestone walls and cedar lintels above the doors and windows. However, the degree of finish and in some cases the materials employed were more rudimentary than those used on the main house.

The Dependancy

The War at Home: World War I Comes to Texas

In early 1917, Texas found itself at the heart of the United State’s decision to go to war.  In January 1917, German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman sent an encoded telegram to the President of Mexico in which he encouraged Mexico to join the Central Powers in exchange for support in the reconquest of parts of the United States once claimed by Mexico (Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona).  Intercepted and decoded by British cryptographers, the “Zimmermann Telegram” was the fuse that compelled Congress to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.

The exhibit takes us back in time 100 years to life as experienced by Texans during World War I. The war was disruptive to family life in many ways.  Enlistments certainly separated families, but everyday life was also impacted in many ways, from pressure to purchase war bonds, to the impact of the Spanish Flu, to a certain level of militarization of society, and food rationing. Finally, the image of the “dough-boy” that has come down to us today is of a white American soldier.  Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and German-Americans in many ways struggled to prove their Americanness while the country was at war, a struggle that was as acute in Texas as in the rest of the country.

The Cochran family lived in our historic house throughout the war era.  Thomas B. Cochran had died in 1913, but his wife and five children (three daughters and two sons) all participated in the war effort in some way.

Using their experience as well as the experiences of other Austinites as a guide, we explore the impact of the Great War on the lives of the people who remained on the home front and the relationships they maintained with soldiers who served elsewhere and abroad.

Upstairs Bedroom

Inspiration

Chicago

Virginia

New York

Grand Rapids

Tucson inspires a sense of freedom among all who visit. Freedom of thought and expression. Freedom to discover and explore. And the freedom to be yourself.

Neill-Cochran House Museum

A Historic Event Space

A Historic Event Space