Sam Rayburn: The Speaker Who Never Left Bonham

The house sits just outside Bonham on a modest rise, a white wooden farmhouse that looks nothing like a seat of power. It was built in nineteen sixteen for Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn, a young congressman from Fannin County who was just beginning what would become the longest speakership in the history of the United States House of Representatives.

Rayburn was born in eighteen eighty-two in Tennessee and came to Texas as a child. He won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives at twenty-four, and in nineteen twelve he was elected to the United States Congress, where he would remain for the next forty-eight years without a single break. He served as Speaker of the House for seventeen of those years , more than any other person in history, a record that still stands.

What made Rayburn singular was not ambition, which he had plenty of, but loyalty. He was loyal to the New Deal when Franklin Roosevelt needed votes to pass it. He was loyal to Truman when the postwar foreign aid programs , the Marshall Plan, NATO , needed a congressional champion who could deliver the Democratic caucus. He was loyal to Lyndon Johnson, his protege from the Texas delegation, who called Rayburn 'Mr. Sam' with genuine reverence. And he was loyal, always, to Bonham.

Rayburn could have lived in Washington. He chose not to. He returned to this farmhouse every chance he could, gave an annual barbecue for the county on the Fourth of July, and insisted that the people who sent him to Congress should be able to find him in person when they needed him. In nineteen fifty-seven, four years before his death, he established a library and museum on the outskirts of town. The centerpiece was a full-scale replica of the Speaker's official office.

He died in nineteen sixty-one, ten months after Kennedy's inauguration, and is buried in Bonham. The house is now a Texas Historic Site. The office replica is still there.