Sienna, Texas - A Local Area Guide
From an 1840s Brazos River plantation to one of Fort Bend County's largest master-planned communities
More about this in Sienna
Sienna sits in eastern Fort Bend County along the Brazos River, mostly in the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Missouri City with a smaller portion in Arcola's ETJ, about 27 miles south of downtown Houston. It's one of the region's larger master-planned communities, and its history stretches back far further than its subdivisions do. This page is a plain guide to that history, written for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Sienna, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A plantation on the Brazos
The land Sienna now occupies has a long and difficult history. In 1840, South Carolina planter Jonathan D. Waters bought the property and built it into a working sugar and cotton plantation along the Brazos River, one that depended on enslaved labor until abolition in 1865. Ownership passed through Houston businessman Thomas W. House in 1872 and former Houston mayor Thomas H. Scanlan in 1913; the Scanlan family later placed the land in the Scanlan Foundation, which benefited the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. From the 1950s until 1972, the Cenacle Sisters ran a religious retreat center on the grounds.
Two attempts at building a community
Turning that land into a modern subdivision took two tries. Developer Larry Johnson founded Johnson Development Corporation in the 1970s and began the first phase of construction in 1978, laying down single-family homes, roads and a 10-mile levee for flood protection. The project stalled in the economic downturn of the 1980s and sat largely dormant for over a decade. It restarted in 1994 with major backing from Tan Yu, a Philippines-born billionaire developer based in Taiwan, and the first homes finally sold in 1996. Growth from there was fast: by 2009, 5,000 of the 5,200 homes originally planned were already occupied.
Dropping "Plantation" from the name
For its first two decades as a subdivision, the community was known as Sienna Plantation. In May 2019, after requests from residents and community groups who wanted to distance the community from its history as a site of enslaved labor, it officially became simply Sienna. The population kept climbing through the transition, growing from 13,721 residents at the 2010 census to 20,204 at the 2020 census.
Built on a levee, tested by a hurricane
The 10-mile levee built during that first 1978 development phase became the community's defining piece of infrastructure decades before anyone expected it to be tested at scale. During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, Fort Bend County ordered a mandatory evacuation of the area even as the levees and pumps held — only about 65 of Sienna's roughly 7,700 houses flooded, a strikingly low number for a storm that flooded hundreds of homes in neighboring communities. Residents later voted, on November 6, 2018, to authorize $139 million in bonds to expand that flood protection even further.
Life along the river today
Sienna today has lakes, parks, an 18-hole golf course, an equestrian center and a trail running four miles along the Brazos River frontage. The Fort Bend County Libraries' Sienna Branch, a $15 million, 45,000-square-foot building, opened April 24, 2010 as a joint project with Houston Community College. You can find current community information through About Sienna.
That is Sienna: an 1840s river plantation that sat quiet for more than a century before becoming one of Fort Bend County's fastest-built communities, still shaped today by the levee its earliest developers put in the ground.