Johnson, who lived and died a lonely, private person, was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, around 1843., the second of the six children of Thomas Jefferson Johnson and his wife, Cathrine Hyde Johnson.
Her father, a school teacher, brought his family to Texas, settling first in Huntsville to be near quality private schools and well established Protestant churches. Johnson was a devout Presbyterian, and education and religion were uppermost in his consideration of a choice for a living site.
Johnson, however, wanted to run his own school and soon located at Weber’s Prairie, the present Webberville, downriver from Austin. The surroundings did not please Johnson, for the school was located adjacent to the Manor Cemetery, just east of the town’s notorious Hell’s Half Acre and race track, and he soon moved to Lockhart. The open country appealed to him more, and he next located the Johnson Institute in Hays County, at the edge of the wilderness, a day’s ride and some 17 miles southwest of Austin. In 1852, he built his first log cabin school on a 300 acre track of land at the foot of Friday Mountain between the branches of Bear Creek.
(There used to be a little country store that was actually a convenience store called Bubba ‘s. It was located on road 1826. And the building itself was one of the cabins from the Johnson Institute. I. In fact, used to work in that little convenience store.)
One story has it that Johnson was offered the site of the present University of Texas that he would establish his school in the capital city.
He refused, however, insisting that he preferred the unsettled, open spaces far from the temptations of saloons he found to be in towns at Johnston Institute he set about teaching higher mathematics and Latin, and although he was a hard taskmaster, he was acknowledged to be a fine teacher. Catherine Hyde Johnson, known to the students as ”Aunt Katie”, served as dorm mother to all of the borders, supervised the housekeeping and cooking, and spent her free moments giving piano lessons to the girls. She also served as neighborhood Dr, often riding outside saddle to health care for one of the communities sick.
Although the school was not attached to any church, Johnson would often give Sunday Bible talks with people from the northwest part of Hays County attending.
Influenced by her father’s religious views, Lizzie read her Bible daily and looked on liquor as an evil influence. All of the Johnson children attended the institute, and Lizzie and her brother John had additional schooling in Washington County, Lizzie at Chapel Hill Female Institute and John at. Soule university.
When the Civil War began, John joined the Confederate army, while Katherine Johnson and her three daughters spent their time spinning and weaving to make clothes for the soldiers. The end of the war brought many changes, for Thomas Johnson died and his son Ben took over the management of the school. Lizzie’s sisters Annie and Emma married and moved away while Lizzie continued to teach at the institute. She taught the basic subjects such as bookkeeping and some say French. She gained the reputation of being a harsh, unrelenting teacher, and in one instance brought the wrath of the community down on her for her severe punishment of a German boy.
Lizzie moved from the school in 1863, teaching at Lockhart from 1865 to 1868.
She also taught a year at Pleasant Hill, just south of Austin, in the 2 story stone Masonic Hall, which is still standing, then three years at Parsons Seminary in Manor. She returned to the institute for one year in 1871 and then taught at the Oak Grove Academy. When her brother closed the institute in 1873, Lizzie was teaching in Austin. She had her own roll book that she took with her from school to school, marking down absences and attendances and writing down her thoughts on scraps of paper tucked among the pages. One piece with arithmetic sums on the back contained the cryptic lines. ”Today is another day when spirit steals, to write just what one thinks”. The lines show Lizzie’s vivid imagination about imagination, which she would use as good advantage in the stories she wrote for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.
