First Colony, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How First Colony grew from a 1976 land deal into 98 neighborhoods
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First Colony is a 9,700-acre master-planned community that makes up most of southern Sugar Land, with a handful of neighborhoods spilling into Missouri City. It isn't a town of its own — it's a planned community woven into Sugar Land's city limits — but it has its own history, its own schools timeline, and its own identity that residents recognize as distinct from the rest of the city. This page is a plain guide to that place. For the full record, the First Colony page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where First Colony came from
First Colony began in 1976, when very little else stood in this part of Fort Bend County. Sugarland Properties Inc., a joint venture between Gerald D. Hines Interests and the Dutch pension fund Stichting Shell, began developing the land as a single master-planned community rather than a patchwork of separate subdivisions. A rookie real estate reporter at the time recalled hearing skepticism from local sources about whether a project so large, sitting so far from anything else, could actually succeed.
How fast it grew
It succeeded quickly. By the 1990 census, First Colony was its own census-designated place with 18,327 residents living in 5,976 housing units — the 108th most populous place in the entire state of Texas, despite still not being part of any incorporated city. Sugar Land began annexing pieces of it through the early and mid-1990s; a single annexation on December 17, 1991 brought in 1,064 acres, 2,314 homes and 433 condominiums along State Highway 6. The city finished the job in November 1997, annexing First Colony's remaining utility districts and pushing Sugar Land's population to almost 60,000 in one move.
Sweetwater and the community's upscale core
Not every corner of First Colony grew the same way. Sweetwater, one of its neighborhoods, drew coverage from the Houston Chronicle as an upscale enclave built around a country club and golf course. In 1990, four houses there sold for a combined $1.8 million; by July 1991, a dozen houses priced above $400,000 had sold for $7.1 million — three times the prior year's total, including a $1.2 million, 6,900-square-foot house built as a replica of Melrose.
A community that looks the same on purpose
First Colony holds its commercial construction to rules most Texas developments don't bother with. Businesses can't put signs on poles, and buildings from department stores to fast-food restaurants must have brick-covered exteriors with white lettering — a standard that has run construction costs 10 to 20 percent above typical. That same consistency shows up in the community's amenities: the First Colony Branch Library, a 19,400-square-foot building that opened in June 1993, houses a kinetic sculpture called "A Planet Clock," and neighborhood parks like Patriot Park and pools like The Lakes and Woodstream are spread evenly across the community's 98 neighborhoods.
What's changed most recently
The most visible recent chapter is Sugar Land Town Square, developed starting in the 2000s on one of the last open parcels inside First Colony. It brought the city's current city hall, restaurants and offices into the middle of a community that had been almost entirely residential for its first 25 years, and it's now the address most people associate with First Colony from the outside, even though most of the community remains the quiet residential streets Sugarland Properties Inc. began laying out back in 1976.
That is First Colony: a single 1976 development that grew fast enough to be its own place on the census before Sugar Land ever finished annexing it.