Friendswood, established as a Quaker colony by Frank J. Brown and Thomas H. Lewis in 1895, became an important center of the fig industry on the Texas Gulf Coast. Among its early settlers was former Kansas farmer Nereus Stout, a highly acclaimed horticulturist who is believed to have been the first farmer to grow figs commercially in Galveston County. About 1910, J.C. Carpenter established Galveston County's first fig preserving plant in Friendswood, drawing first on the Stout farm and later on a widening network of growers as figs became a popular and reliable cash crop. By the early 1920s, Galveston County produced half of all figs grown in a seven-county area along the Gulf Coast, and in 1930 one-third of the county's leading fig producers were from Friendswood, then a community of fewer than 300 residents. The town's two fig preserving plants supported nurserymen and orchardists and provided jobs for many residents, including during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, fig production along the Texas Gulf Coast declined, Friendswood's orchards began disappearing in the 1950s, and the town's last commercial fig preserving plant, the last still operating on the Texas Gulf Coast, closed in 1968.