Glenblythe Plantation

The Glenblythe Plantation is a former plantation in Gay Hill, Washington County, Texas. Before the American Civil War, it was cultivated with slave labor.

It was located in what is now the ghost town of Gay Hill near Brenham in Washington County, Texas.

It was established in 1859 by Thomas Affleck (1812-1868), a Scottish immigrant, nurseryman, agrarian writer and planter, who also had property in Washington, Mississippi. The name Glenblythe is Scottish Gaelic for "joyous valley."

The plantation house had two and a half floors. It included six bedrooms, two halls, a kitchen, a laundry room, a store room, a dining room, a parlor, three enclosed galleries, and two long galleries alongside the house. Next door, there was a lumber room, a carriage house, a granary, stables, a poultry yard, a pigeonry, and servants' houses. There were also six houses for farmhands. Additionally, there was another house for the overseer. Two miles away, there was a church, a hospital, a storehouse, and twenty frame houses, a sugar mill, a flour mill, a gin house, a press, a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, and another house for the mill foreman.

The plantation was primarily used for agricultural purposes. There were fields of cotton, corn, barley, millet, hay, and sorghum. Affleck also bred stock such as sheep, cows, mules, oxen, and horses.

The plantation was home to one of the largest and earliest plant nurseries in the American South, known as "Central Nurseries." Affleck, who had studied agriculture at the University of Edinburgh, experimented with new crops and also discovered some plants endemic to the South. For example, he discovered the Old Gay Hill red china rose, which is native to Gay Hill.

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