"If General Thomas Rusk could come back to his old home town, Nacogdoches, where he spent the last 20 years of his useful life, and look over the present conditions he would probably be amazed at the changes that have been made during the sixty-six years of his absence since his death in July, 1857. . . .

His homestead of several hundred acres, with varied landscape of wild woods and fertile lands fenced and cultivated, are all changed and displaced.

This homestead was not even located where it is now. It was then just exactly one mile north of town out on the Henderson Road....There was no North Street then, and there were very few houses on this road between the Rusk rural home and town. They could all be counted on the fingers of two hands.

When General Rusk or his four sons went to town they generally rode horseback and they often carried a rifle or shot gun to kill a squirrel on the way, or to join other hunters in a deer drive near town. . . .

North Street, now the pride of the city, was more beautiful as the Henderson road then than it is now. It led off midway up the lovely plateau or dividing ground between the two creeks, the La Nana on the east and the Banita on the west. These two creeks at a mile above town were about a mile apart and were boundaries of the Rusk homestead lands.

The charms of this road consisted of its being located on a level, and being almost straight, and in peculiar red soil and luxuriant woods, trees, vines and flowers bordering and shading the road. These forests were almost phenomenal in the variety and beauty of timbers and vegetation growing wherever not destroyed by man. And they extended into town as well as out of it. Several varieties of oaks, huge in size, and wondrous in form, also hickory in mammoth fruiting trees. Dogwoods that are the first to beautify the wild woods in spring, Black haws, red haws, gums, and sky-high pines, grapes in profusion as to kinds and quantities, grasses and green growths of flowering plants, so abundant as to amaze the observer. . . ."