Neill-Cochran House Museum

The Neill-Cochran House Museum, built in 1855, is a historic Greek Revival house in Austin, Texas, offering insights into 19th-century history through exhibits and tours.

Planning your visit

The Neill-Cochran House is a Greek Revival mansion of 1855, one of the oldest buildings in Austin, and the museum has spent recent years substantially reframing what it tells visitors.

The house was built with enslaved labour, and in 2021 the museum confirmed that a small stone building on the property — long described as a carriage house or outbuilding — was in fact slave quarters, one of very few surviving in Texas. It now anchors an exhibition on slavery in Austin, a history the city has generally underplayed.

The main house covers nineteenth-century Texas domestic life, with period rooms and decorative arts, and the building served briefly as a hospital and then as the Texas Institute for the Blind.

The reinterpretation makes this a more interesting visit than a standard historic house, precisely because the museum has been public about what it previously failed to say.

It sits near the University of Texas. Allow an hour. Current availability is shown below.