Two Presidents and a Boyhood in the Oil Patch

The house at fourteen twelve West Ohio Avenue in Midland is not large. It was built in nineteen thirty-nine and purchased by the Bush family in nineteen fifty-one for nine thousand dollars. It has one story, a modest footprint, and the sort of plain exterior that proliferated in American postwar suburbs. George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara moved into it with their children, including a seven-year-old named George Walker Bush who would, half a century later, become the forty-third president of the United States.

The elder Bush had come to West Texas in nineteen forty-eight from a wealthy Connecticut family and a Yale education. He had worked for an oil equipment company in Odessa before moving to Midland to start his own business. He founded Zapata Petroleum in nineteen fifty-three and built it into a going concern. He has been quoted as saying, at Odessa we became Texans and proud of it.

The family lived in the Midland house from nineteen fifty-one to nineteen fifty-five. Those four years produced one of the more intimate pieces of presidential biography in American history. George W. Bush was a child here when his sister Robin, who was three years old, was diagnosed with leukemia. She died in nineteen fifty-three. The family kept her illness largely private during her treatment and did not tell George until after her death. His mother has written about his confusion and grief when he found out. The house held those years, the oil company ambition, the family prosperity, and also the loss.

The home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand four and became a museum in two thousand six. It was transferred to the Texas Historical Commission in two thousand twenty-three. Midland has produced two presidents, and both of them left their fingerprints on this unassuming house on Ohio Avenue.