Elisabeth Ney Museum (Former Studio)

Elisabet Ney was a German sculptor who had already carved Schopenhauer, Garibaldi and King Ludwig II of Bavaria before she and her husband moved to Texas in 1873. In 1892 she built this limestone studio in Hyde Park and named it Formosa, working here on the statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin that still stand in the Texas Capitol and in Washington. She was a woman with a European reputation working alone in a Texas field, and she kept her own name after marriage, which scandalized her neighbors. After she died in 1907 friends preserved the studio exactly as she used it. It became a museum in 1911 — one of the oldest in the state.