Plum Grove, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Plum Grove incorporated, grew fast, and keeps fighting floodwater
More about this in Plum Grove
Plum Grove sits at the junction of Farm roads 2090 and 1010 in northwestern Liberty County, about 40 miles northeast of downtown Houston. It's one of the smallest incorporated cities in the region, and also one of the fastest-changing, sitting right beside one of the largest unincorporated developments in Texas. This page is a plain guide to the place, written for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Plum Grove, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A small city that voted itself into existence
Plum Grove became an incorporated city on a 55-7 vote in December 1968. For decades afterward it stayed small and steady: about 484 residents in the mid-1970s, 455 in 1980, 480 in 1990, and 930 by 2000. It's still a place without its own post office — mail runs through the wider Liberty County system rather than a dedicated Plum Grove branch.
A population that doubled almost overnight
After dipping to 600 residents in 2010, Plum Grove's population doubled to 1,245 by the 2020 census, driven largely by a wave of mostly Hispanic residents moving in from elsewhere in Greater Houston. By that count, Latino residents made up 70.0% of the city's population, a striking shift for a town that had grown slowly for the previous half-century.
The neighbor that changed everything
Much of that growth traces back to Colony Ridge, a roughly 33,000-acre unincorporated development just outside Plum Grove's city limits. Founded in 2011, it has grown to somewhere around 40,000 residents on land sold off in phases over more than a decade. Plum Grove's own city government has had to absorb the traffic, infrastructure strain and drainage pressure that kind of growth brings to a small, rural neighbor.
A city that keeps fighting the water
Flooding is a recurring part of life here. Tropical Storm Imelda dropped an unprecedented 28 inches of rain on the area over three days in September 2019, tearing open drainage failures and sand-mine breaches at four separate locations near the city. In response, Plum Grove received a $1 million HUD grant, announced in March 2023, to fund drainage improvements along Orange Branch Creek — culvert work and road restoration aimed at undoing some of the damage Imelda left behind.
Schools and daily life
Plum Grove is served by the Cleveland Independent School District, and residents are zoned to Lone Star College for higher education. It's a rural city in the Census Bureau's own classification — every resident counted in the 2020 census lived outside what the Bureau defines as an urban area.
That is Plum Grove: a city small enough to have no post office of its own, that doubled in population inside a single decade, and that keeps rebuilding its roads and drainage against water that keeps coming back.