AUSTIN (AP) - Documents in a Pulitzer Prize-winning report on a Texas veterans' land scandal will be housed in the General Land Office where the scheme was uncovered in the 1950s.

Wednesday, former reporter Ken Towery of Austin will donate the papers related to his efforts at The Cuero Record in South Texas that won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

His reports made longtime Land Commissioner Bascom Giles the state's first elected official imprisoned for a crime committed in office.

Towery, now 80, said he had often thought about where the archive would wind up and rejected a University of Texas overture for them.

"It just seemed like it was being presumptuous, and it just seemed to me like it didn't rank that high," he said.

Towery, who met earlier this year with Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a state history buff, said it then became clear that the land office was the place for the documents. The Land Office archives hold some of the state's greatest paper treasures, including original land grants carrying signatures of Alamo heroes.

The papers, including copies of the Cuero Record editions that carried the stories, had traveled around with Towery for years as his family moved.

His wife, Louise, as the unofficial family archivist, had stored the stories and papers on the veterans' scam, in which a state allocation of $100 million to buy land and sell it to vets at low-interest rates wound up benefiting land promoters.

Veterans were paid or defrauded by promoters to sign papers allowing the promoters to skirt limits designed to guarantee the money would be used to help individual veterans, not land speculators.

Patterson called Towery's stories a landmark.

"I have read the history of this office, but he lived it," Patterson told the Austin American-Statesman for its Sunday's editions. "No one person has played a greater role in the reform of the Veterans Land Board than Ken Towery. That he chose us as the repository for the record of his role in Texas history is an honor."

Giles, who prosecutors said took bribes in return for appraising land acquired by the state for sale to veterans at inflated values, was convicted in 1955 and sentenced to nine concurrent six-year prison terms.

After leaving journalism, Towery became a Republican political consultant, including a 1963-1969 stint as press secretary for U.S. Sen. John Tower of Texas. He later served as deputy director of the United States Information Agency and for 10 years as a Ronald Reagan appointee on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Towery had served in the U.S. Army in World War II and spent three years in Japanese prison camps, which he later recounted in a book. He said malfeasance in the land program was particularly offensive because it used unwitting veterans to help land developers benefit from the state program.

As an Austin reporter in later Capitol coverage, Towery said more lessons were left to be learned in other scandals.