Porter Farms

The boll weevil created the audience for Seaman Knapp's idea. The Handbook of Texas says the pest reached Texas in 1903, farms were abandoned and whole counties emptied, and the Department of Agriculture hired Knapp to show cotton could still be grown. Terrell's citizens had asked for an expert too. Knapp visited Walter Porter's farm monthly, applying methods from Iowa and Louisiana. In the first year 7,000 farmers agreed to run demonstration farms, the county-agent plan began in 1906, and boys' clubs that foreran 4-H followed. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 wrote it into federal law.

What the plaque says

Porter Farms Birthplace of agricultural (cooperative) extension, under lead of Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, U.S. Department of Agriculture. On Feb. 26, 1903, from places offered, a special committee of citizens selected farm of Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Porter for first "farm demonstration". The project was highly successful in demonstrating methods of farming. Extension is now part of each state land-grant university and adapted in many foreign nations. Porter sons still operate this pioneer farm, "Where science and farmers first joined hands". (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 4.0 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 15 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 26 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.

More markers nearby

• Public Education in Terrell — 1.0 mi
• Marrs, S. M. N. — 2.2 mi
• Rockwall and Brin Church of Christ — 2.5 mi
• First Baptist Church of Terrell — 2.5 mi