McCuistion Home

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how Duane tells it back to you. Somewhere in Lamar County stands a house that has quietly watched the whole arc of Texas medicine, and it started, as so many good stories do, with a doctor and a piece of raw timber. Back in 1858, a man named A.

S. Johnson built this place as a story and a half home. Now that's not quite a full two-story, not quite a single floor, something in between, which maybe suited a frontier doctor just fine.

A man who lived between worlds. Johnson was an early physician out here, and he put up a house meant to last. It lasted.

Come 1907, somebody saw fit to remodel the place, and it kept on standing. Then, in 1916, a new doctor moved in. Dr.

L. P. McCuistion.

Born in 1869, and the marker tells us he left this world in 1947. In between those two years, he spent fifty-seven of them as a physician. Think on that a moment.

Fifty-seven years tending to people, reading pulses, making rounds. And he wasn't content just to practice in a single room or a small office. In 1914, Dr.

McCuistion founded the sanitarium of Paris, right there in Paris, Texas, and he led the charge in developing the whole city into a genuine hospital center. The house A. S.

Johnson built for one doctor, it ended up sheltering the ambitions of another man who turned a whole town into a place of healing. Some houses just have that kind of gravity to them.

What the marker says

Built 1858 as story and a half home by early doctor, A. S. Johnson. Remodelled 1907. Occupied in 1916 by Dr. L. P. McCuistion (1869-1947), 57 years a physician, who founded the sanitarium of Paris in 1914 and led in development of Paris as a hospital center. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965