Thomas Affleck, born in Scotland in 1812, came to the United States in 1832 and became one of the world’s foremost researcher-writers on agriculture and horticulture, gaining wide fame as a scientist and agricultural writer after establishing one of the South’s finest nurseries in Mississippi. Before settling in Texas, he landscaped the State Capitol grounds for both Louisiana and Texas. From 1858 to 1868 he lived on his 3,500-acre Glenblythe plantation two miles south of here, where he developed the famous central Texas nurseries and experimental fields for new plant varieties and gained recognition as one of the earliest promoters and developers of conservation farming. Around the Glenblythe mansion and guest houses he created ornamental gardens and greenhouses, a vegetable garden, orchard, church, hospital, day nursery, store, homes, workshop, stock pens, and flour and lumber mills. During the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, he built ambulances and wagons and fed Waul’s Legion in a training camp nearby. After the war he became a key figure in the rehabilitation of farming in Texas and traveled to Europe to recruit settlers. He died in 1868 and was buried near his home, and his writings, especially Affleck’s Southern Rural Almanac, remained influential for years; his Report on Agricultural Grasses became a Senate Executive Document in 1879.