Iowa Colony, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a town of twenty-seven people became one of Brazoria County's fastest-growing cities
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Iowa Colony sits in northern Brazoria County on State Highway 288, about 22 miles south of downtown Houston. For most of the twentieth century it was one of the smallest towns in the region; today it's one of the fastest-growing. This page is a plain guide to that story. For the full record, the Iowa Colony, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
An Iowa land company's Texas colony
Iowa Colony's name is exactly what it sounds like. The town was founded in 1908 by the Emigration Land Company of Des Moines, Iowa, and named after two Iowans involved in its founding, G. I. Huffmann and Robert Beard. A post office followed in 1919, and rice farming — the crop that built much of this stretch of the Texas coastal prairie — arrived the following year, in 1920.
A town of twenty-seven people for half a century
For most of the twentieth century, Iowa Colony barely grew at all. Its population crept up to only twenty-seven residents and stayed close to that number until the mid-1960s, even after oil was discovered nearby in 1948 and brought regional jobs to the area. The town wasn't officially incorporated until 1972, and as late as 1989 it still counted just 661 residents.
A notorious stretch of highway
Iowa Colony has one unusual claim to fame from this quiet era: in the early 1990s, the town gained a reputation as a major speed trap, aggressive enough that it's cited as part of the inspiration for a Texas statute that limits how much revenue small municipalities can collect from traffic-fine profits.
From 675 people to a Home Rule city almost overnight
Growth finally arrived, and arrived fast. Iowa Colony's population was 675 in 1990, only 1,170 by 2010, but then it took off: an estimated 3,233 by 2019, 8,154 at the 2020 census, and past 8,000 the following year — a jump the city itself has described as 400% growth. That growth pushed Iowa Colony past the 5,000-resident threshold needed to seek Home Rule status, and voters approved the city's first Home Rule Charter on November 3, 2020.
Meridiana and the shape of the new city
Much of that growth traces to Meridiana, a 2,700-acre master-planned community that Rise Communities began building in April 2015 and opened to its first residents in March 2017, with plans for 5,500 homes across Iowa Colony and neighboring Manvel. It's the kind of project that can turn a town of a few hundred people into a city of thousands within a decade.
A small-town city hall
For all its recent growth, Iowa Colony still runs its local government out of a single building — city hall, the community center and the municipal court all share the same address, right next to the fire department. You can find more about local services through the City of Iowa Colony website.