Sam Rayburn House Museum, Historic residence museum in Bonham, Texas.

The Sam Rayburn House Museum is a 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame house with a gabled roof, three gabled dormers, and a shed-roof portico supported by two-story Tuscan columns. Its clapboarded facade is three bays wide, with a center entrance framed by sidelight and transom windows beneath a projecting cornice. Dallas architect W.B. Yarborough designed the major expansion that gave the house its present form.

The house was built in 1916, not around 1904 as once thought: Sam Rayburn's brother Tom took a lien on the property before any house stood on it. Rayburn later commissioned Dallas architect W.B. Yarborough to enlarge the smaller hip-roofed original into its present form. He lived there until his death in 1961; his sister stayed on until 1969, and in 1972 the Sam Rayburn Foundation gave most of the property to the state.

The house displays how a 20th-century political family lived through preserved furniture, photographs, and personal objects collected during Sam Rayburn's career. Walking through the rooms gives a sense of how someone who held major power in Congress balanced daily home life with national responsibilities.

The site sits on about 2 acres on the south side of Texas Highway 56, on the western outskirts of Bonham. Besides the main house, the grounds hold a storage building, shed, garage, wellhouse and barn, so allow time to walk between them. The Texas Historical Commission has run the property as a state historic site since 1972.

The 1947 Cadillac on the property is not kept in the barn: the barn was the one building the Sam Rayburn Foundation withheld when it transferred the rest of the property to the state in 1972. The house itself retains all its original furnishings, left as they were when the Rayburn family lived there.