Concern For Fort Bend Includes Current Constituents

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From the time the Imperial Sugar Company began its operation in Sugar Land in 1906, and throughout the years, the company owned virtually everything else in the town. Imperial owned the land, the mercantile, feed store, a pharmacy, the bank, to the grocery store, and an auto dealership which made Sugar Land a true company town. What you bought was paid out of the Imperial paycheck. But unlike many company towns such as the mining towns in Kentucky and West Virginia or the mill towns in New England where poverty persisted, Sugar Land was a very good place to live and work. The Imperial model was not the same because it created a successful "company town" run in virtually all aspects by the Imperial Sugar Company. 

This was due in large part to the generosity of Mr. Ike Kempner, owner of Imperial, who poured much of his profits back into the town for housing, streets, schools, shopping, infrastructure, and employee pay, benefits, and doctors. I.H. Kempner was from Galveston. Ike continued to live there. He wanted a stable workforce by building amenities and invested greatly in the schools and hospitals knowing that families were essential to his town's and company's success. Mr. William Eldridge was Kempner's partner in the sense that he managed the Sugar Land company town, sometimes sternly but almost always fairly. He was considered the hands-on company manager and was greatly missed after his death in 1932.

Talk to any of the people who worked for Imperial, or their children, and they will say that Sugar Land was an ideal place. And it was Kempner's vision to have a kind of capitalist utopia. This company town was more a utopia, one man's vision of the perfect melding of company worker and municipal citizen.

By 1950, Imperial was automated and production up 25 percent after the war's rationing. But by the mid-50's, Kempner wanted out of the land business, especially after the death of his son Herbert in 1953, who had been most responsible for operations of the company and the town. Nearly all of the towns in Fort Bend County were considering incorporation, so there was a natural protectionism that arose, so other towns did not encroach. Sugar Land began an inexorable move towards incorporation to avoid Stafford and Missouri City because both communities allowed gambling and saloons, establishments that Sugar Land was dead set against. Sugar Land residents (with the blessing of Imperial and Sugar Land Industries) hurried to build a quorum of residents and file the necessary papers. Kempner began selling the 500 plus homes owned by the company, for very fair prices, and supported the initiative to incorporate.

1835 - Despairing of the chance for security and peace, Austin hopes Mexico will sell Texas to the U.S. He is eager for immigration to increase so Texas becomes more "Americanized." Soon it does. with the repeal of the Law of April 6, 1830, a thousand immigrants per month begin to arrive at the mouth of the Brazos.

January 1836 - As revolutionary fever mounts, the provisional state government dispatches Austin to the U.S. to raise funds for a war effort. He has calling cards printed for the mission, which will take him from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. and New York City. The cards read simply, "Stephen F. Austin, of Texas."

February 1836 - A courier rides through the colony bringing a letter from Colonel William B. Travis calling for reinforcements at the Alamo. At Stafford, an 11-year-old girl, Dilue Rose, melts lead and molds bullets for the volunteers going to join Texas General Sam Houston's army.

March 1836 - Texas declares independence from Mexico on March 2. News reaches the colony of the March 6 fall of the Alamo. A dispatch from General Houston instructs the settlers to leave. With the Texas army in retreat, the advance of the Mexican army led by Santa Anna sparks a panic, known as the "Runaway Scrape." Many Texians (residents of Mexican Texas), including families in this vicinity fled eastward. Families flee for 100 miles or more. Wiley Martin defends the Brazos River crossing at Fort Bend until his troops are maneuvered out of the way and Santa Anna transports part of his army across present- day Sugar Land before his defeat at The Battle of San Jacinto.

April 1836 - Santa Anna is defeated by General Houston at San Jacinto on April 21. When the Fort Settlement colonists return, they find their homes looted, livestock scattered, and fields burned.

June 1836 - Austin returns to Texas. He fails in a campaign to become the first President of the Republic of Texas when the popular General Houston enters the race two weeks before the September election. Houston wins in a landslide and asks Austin to serve as secretary of state.

December 1836 - Stephen F. Austin is stricken with pneumonia and dies at age 43 in the village of Columbia, the first capital of Texas. His body is carried on a steamship down the Brazos for burial at his family's plantation at Peach Point. "The Father of Texas is no more! The first pioneer of the wilderness has departed," reads the official notice. All military posts in the republic fire a 23-gun salute, one volley for each county.

I837 - Fort Bend County is formed. Jane Long has sold a portion of her league to Robert Handy to develop the town of Richmond, which becomes one of the first cities granted a charter by the Republic of Texas. Long opens a hotel and boarding house in town. She makes her home on Long Plantation outside the city, residing there until her death in 1880.

1838 - Fort Bend County elects its first chief justice and county commissioners. Citizens vote Richmond as the county seat.

1838 - Samuel Williams transfers ownership of the Oakland property to his brother Nathaniel, who pays just over $13,000 for it. Nathaniel and a third brother, Matthew, run the plantation and grow cotton, corn, and sugarcane.

1839 - The first newspaper is published in the county, the weekly "Richmond Telescope." The first church is established in Richmond when a Methodist missionary arrives.

1840 - Sugarcane is planted on Oakland Plantation where it flourishes. Sugar from the region is considered superior, containing more juice than the sugarcane in Louisiana. The five-county area is known as the "Sugar Bowl of Texas."

1843 - The Williams brothers install a mule-powered commercial sugar mill along the west bank of Oyster Creek, just a few yards from the Char house still standing in the old Imperial refinery complex. In the fields of the William's Oakland Plantation overseers on horseback managed enslaved persons as they planted, cultivated, and harvested sugar cane and transported it to the sugar mill. Many years later, this becomes the location of Imperial Sugar, making the company the oldest business in Texas still manufacturing the same products on the same site.

1845 - Texas is annexed in the U.S. in December 29 and becomes the 28th state.

1849 - The first Fort Bend County courthouse is completed.

1850 - Fort Bend County contains 109 farms totaling nearly 11,000 improved acres. It is one of only six counties in the state with a slave majority.

1851 - The second President of Texas, Mirabeau B. Lamar retires to Richmond. He builds a plantation home on land purchased from Jane Long.

1852 - The Male and Female Academy opens as the first school in Richmond.

1853 - The Oakland Plantation is sold to W. J. Kyle and B.F. Terry, two prospectors who earned fortunes in California gold mines. They rename the property Sugar Land, and it becomes the social center of the area. Terry's opulent home included a ballroom and was close to a horse racetrack. His home and racetrack were located near today's Sugar Mill Elementary School. Business was good and the partners started expanding their plantation by buying neighboring properties. Within five years they purchase another 8,000 adjoining acres. By 1861 Terry is one of the wealthiest men in the state.

1853 - The first train arrives along the first railroad in Texas, which connects Harrisburg, near Houston, and Stafford. It will be two years before the railroad is extended to reach the east bank of the Brazos opposite Richmond.

1855 - Forty raw sugar mills operate in the four-county area. Sugar cane replaces cotton as the principal crop on many plantations.

1858 - Fort Bend has five ports or landings on the Brazos: Big Creek, Waters, Richmond, Gaston, and Randon.

1860 - Fort Bend County contains 159 farms totaling more than 20,000 improved acres.

1861 - Texas secedes from the Union. B.F. Terry did not hesitate to express his Confederate secessionist views to visitors. He recruits and leads one of the most famous regiments in the Civil War, the 8th Texas Cavalry known as "Terry's Texas Rangers". The co-owner of Sugar Land died after leading them into war. He died at the age of forty and was buried with honors near his Sugar Land home.

1864 - Kyle who was older, continued to run the plantation. The war and subsequent Reconstruction period drained the area's vitality and decimated its economy. Kyle died three years later, and over time, his heirs sold off the land. B.F. Terry's remains were relocated to Glenwood Cemetery in Houston when the land was sold.

1865 - At a gathering under a broad oak tree on Palmer Plantation, neighboring slaves first hear that they are freed.

1866 - Fort Bend County ranks fourth in the state in cattle assessment, reaching up to 100,000 head.

1868 - In spite of post-war economic troubles, local land remained rich and fertile, awaiting cultivation. Land price dropped after the war, and, in 1868, Littleberry Ambrose Ellis started buying local property in the old Hodge, Battle, and Cartwright leagues west of the Terry/Kyle plantation. He named it Sartartia, after his eldest daughter.

1871 - The Texas Legislature passes a law requiring that state convicts be leased to entrepreneurs as laborers. Sixty convicts are leased to work on Fort Bend County plantations.

1875 - Brazos River flooding causes most Richmond merchants to lose their business holdings. Cotton begins to serve as currency, and a tenant-farming system evolves.

1878 - Littleberry Ellis joined Confederate Colonel Edward H. Cunningham to run the state's penal system. When slavery ended after the war, there were not enough workers to cultivate crops, so they began using convicts on their personal land. They also contracted convicts out to other plantation owners across Texas. Convict leasing was a state institution and practiced throughout the southern United States.

1880 - After the city of Richmond refuses to give right-of-way, the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railway extends its track to a small community three miles west and builds the Rosenberg Junction depot, named after the president of the railroad, Henry von Rosenberg. New railroad routes pass through productive farmlands and attract new settlers, many of whom are immigrants from Central Europe.

1883 - The state resumed control of the penal system, instituting its own convict lease system. Cunningham and Ellis amicably severed business ties. E.H. Cunningham started buying neighboring properties, including the Terry/Kyle plantation, sugar mill, and gin. He amassed between twelve and fifteen thousand acres, leasing convicts from state to work his land. The convict contract and lease systems replaced slavery as the source of backbreaking, intense labor needed to grow sugar cane and other crops on large plantations.

1883 - The new owner of Sugar Plantation, E.H. Cunningham, and his neighbor, Littleberry Ellis, combine their acreage and build a 600-ton raw sugar mill which they name the Imperial Mill.

1889 - A feud for political control of Fort Bend County culminates in "The Battle of Richmond" on August 16, a gun skirmish between the Jaybird and Woodpecker factions.

1890 - Real estate investors try to promote Missouri City to buyers from St. Louis and surrounding Missouri towns, calling it a "land of genial sunshine and eternal summer." Five years later one of the worst blizzards in Gulf Coast history dumps 24 inches of snow on the city.

1894 - Wells Fargo Company opens a Rosenberg office. The freight agent handles the rail shipment of all kinds of cargo, from livestock to gold and silver bullion. Local men armed with rifles and pistols are hired to guard shipments at the train depot.

1896 - The state's first sugar refinery is built at Sugar Land on the site of the original raw sugar mill dating from 1843. The first white, free flowing refined sugar is successfully introduced to Texas and the Midwest.

1899 - Eleven days of rainfall produce the greatest Brazos River flood on record. Twelve thousand square miles are flooded and 284 people die. Thousands are left homeless. Property damage totals more than $9 million.