Rosharon, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a rose garden, a railroad stop and a rice economy became today's Rosharon
More about this in Rosharon
Rosharon is a census-designated place in Brazoria County at the crossing of Farm to Market Road 521 and Farm to Market Road 1462. It's small, but it carries an unusually layered history for its size — a rose garden, a railroad nickname, a farming community, and a cluster of state prison units all sit inside the same few square miles. This page is a plain guide to that story. For the full record, the Rosharon, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A rose garden gave the town its name
Rosharon's town site went unnamed for its early years. Before the Civil War, cotton and sugar plantations worked this stretch of prairie, and once the Houston Tap and Brazoria Railway was completed in 1859, the local train stop took the name Masterson's Station, after a nearby plantation owner. Trainmen had their own name for it, too — "Buttermilk Station," because an early resident used to bring a bucket of buttermilk and a dipper down to give the engineer and crew something to drink. The name Rosharon itself didn't arrive until around 1900, when George Wetmore Colles Jr., an engineer trained at Yale and the Stevens Institute of Technology, bought property here and named his estate the "Rose of Sharon Garden Ranch" after the many Cherokee Roses growing on it.
A rice economy and a town built by hand
Tom Lochridge platted the actual town site and had a cotton gin hauled in from Houston, whose engine then doubled as Rosharon's first power plant; the town's first telephone exchange ran out of his own house. The South Texas Water Company arrived in 1935, and its irrigation canals brought roughly seventy-five to eighty rice farmers into the area. For decades afterward, Rosharon stayed small and rural — an estimated 500 residents by the late 1980s, only 435 in 1990.
Prisons, a product center and a skydiving airstrip
Rosharon's modern economy runs on some unexpected anchors. Four Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison units sit nearby — Ramsey, Stringfellow and Terrell, which are co-located, plus the Darrington Unit — and prison employees and their families have long added to the local economy. A Schlumberger product center operates here as well, and Rosharon is also home to Skydive Spaceland Houston, a major skydiving center with its own dedicated airstrip at the corner of FM 521 and FM 1462.
Little Cambodia
One of Rosharon's most distinctive communities is known locally as "Little Cambodia," a Cambodian-American farming settlement established in 1985 by Yani Rose Keo. Its farmers grow water spinach commercially, a crop that once put them at odds with state wildlife regulators before permitted farming was allowed to continue. As of 2015, ZIP code 77583 — Rosharon's own ZIP code — had the highest concentration of Cambodian Americans anywhere in the Greater Houston area.
From 435 residents to a modern subdivision
Rosharon's population barely moved for most of the twentieth century, sitting at just 435 in 1990. Growth arrived later and quickly, once Lakes of Savannah and similar master-planned communities began filling in the area after 2000; by the 2020 census the population had reached 1,362. Housing figures tell the same story in more detail — close to three-quarters of Rosharon's homes were built since 2000, while roughly a fifth date back to 1940 through 1969, with almost nothing built in the decades between.