Fulshear, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Fulshear began, how it grew into one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas, and the ground it stands on
More about this in Fulshear
Fulshear sits in northwestern Fort Bend County, at the intersection of FM 359 and FM 1093, about 33 miles west of downtown Houston. It went from a population of roughly 700 residents in the late 2000s to more than 64,000 today, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand the town before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Fulshear, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
Fulshear is named for Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred settlers, who received a land grant from the Mexican government on July 16, 1824, and moved his family from Tennessee to build a plantation on the Brazos River. His son, Churchill Fulshear Jr., expanded the family's holdings after his father's death in 1831, running a cotton gin and flour mill that lasted into the 1880s.
The modern town took shape when Churchill Jr. granted the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad the right of way through the family plantation in 1888. The town was platted in 1890, and the years that followed brought a public school district in 1893 and a Methodist church in 1894, along with the general stores, a barber shop, a drug store and a hotel that filled out a small Texas railroad town.
Boom, bust and a long stretch as a small town
By 1898 Fulshear had grown to 250 residents supporting eleven stores and three saloons. A fire destroyed a block of businesses in 1910, but the town rebuilt, and by 1929 it counted 300 residents and ten stores. The Depression hit hard — the population fell to 100 by 1933, around the time the old Fulshear plantation house was torn down. For decades after, Fulshear stayed a small farming town, with population holding between 300 and 700 residents all the way into the 1970s.
Incorporation and the growth that followed
The city was incorporated in 1977, and for years afterward it remained a quiet stop between Houston and the countryside. That changed in the 2000s. The city had about 700 residents around 2008; by October 2013 that number had passed 5,000. By the 2020 census Fulshear counted 16,856 residents, and 2025 estimates put the city at roughly 64,630 — nearly a hundred-fold increase from where it stood less than two decades earlier. In May 2017, MSN.com named Fulshear the richest small town in Texas.
The subdivisions that built the new Fulshear
Cross Creek Ranch, a 3,200-acre community developed by Johnson Development, began taking shape in 2006 and sold its first homes in 2008. Jordan Ranch, a 1,350-acre community the same developer started building in 2015, takes its name from Chester and Bess Jordan, ranchers who arrived in Fulshear back in 1936. Weston Lakes, an older 1,600-acre gated community built around a country club that's stood since 1986, gives the area one of its longest-running planned neighborhoods. Together these communities turned a town of a few hundred people into a city approaching the size of a small metro area in under two decades.
Everyday life in Fulshear
The Bob Lutts Fulshear/Simonton Branch Library, part of the Fort Bend County Libraries system, opened in May 1998 on land that had previously served as the Fort Bend County Precinct 4 headquarters. Fort Bend County has no hospital district of its own; OakBend Medical Center serves as the county's contracted charity hospital. Students in Fulshear are split between two districts, Lamar Consolidated ISD in the older parts of town and Katy ISD in the newer growth areas to the north, a reminder that Fulshear's boundary lines were drawn well before its recent growth arrived.
That is Fulshear: a Brazos River plantation town turned railroad stop, that spent most of a century as a village of a few hundred people before becoming one of the fastest-growing and, for a stretch, one of the wealthiest small cities in Texas.