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General George Custer, his brother Tom, his wife Libbie along with his staff and their families were assigned to Austin Texas in 1865 shortly after the Civil War. The governor of Texas offered Custer the Blind Asylum, which had been closed during the war, for his headquarters. A few miles away, Custer used what is now known as the Neill-Cochran House as a hospital for his sick and wounded soldiers. Years after Custers’s death, Libbie wrote about their time in Austin, Texas in her book “Tenting on the Plains”.
The hospital was originally designed and built by Master builder Abner Cook as an urban estate for a Mr. William Hill. By coincidence, the house was also used several years earlier by the State of Texas as a temporary school for the blind while the Blind Asylum was being Constructed.
In the years that followed, the home was owned by Colonel Andrew Neill and later Judge Cochran, a native Texan. In 1958 it was purchased by The National Society of The Colonial Dames in America in The State of Texas. The NSCDA operates it as a museum today.
