Sugar Land, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a plantation became a company town, then one of Houston's largest suburbs
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Sugar Land sits about 19 to 20 miles southwest of downtown Houston, centered on the junction of State Highway 6 and Interstate 69/U.S. 59. The city grew up around a single crop and a single company, and the shape of that history still runs through the street layout today, from the older core near the old refinery to the master-planned neighborhoods that spread west and south of it. This page is a plain guide to that place. For the full record, the Sugar Land, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
Sugar Land started as a plantation in the Brazos River floodplain. Samuel M. Williams was one of the first to settle the land, calling it Oakland Plantation, and in 1853 Benjamin Terry and William J. Kyle bought it from the Williams family. Terry, who later organized a division of Texas Rangers during the Civil War, is the man the town is named after. After the Civil War, Colonel E. H. Cunningham bought the 12,500-acre plantation and built a sugar-refining plant, platting the land into a town around it in 1879.
The company-town years
In 1908, a partnership led by the Kempner family of Galveston merged the neighboring Ellis and Cunningham plantations into a single operation and renamed it the Imperial Sugar Company. From the 1910s until 1959, Sugar Land was essentially owned and run by that company. Imperial Sugar built the workers' housing, encouraged schools, built a hospital, and ran the businesses that served the town. Many of those original company-built houses still stand today in the city's older neighborhoods, The Hill and Mayfield Park.
Voters made Sugar Land a general-law city in 1959, with T. E. Harman becoming the first mayor. The refinery that had defined the town for half a century kept running for decades after incorporation, finally closing in 2003 — though Imperial Sugar's corporate headquarters stayed in the city.
How the master-planned communities took over
The first big shift toward the Sugar Land most people picture today came with Sugar Creek, built starting in the early 1960s on roughly 1,200 acres bought from the Imperial Cattle Ranch. It introduced country-club living to the city — golf courses, swimming pools, a private security service — and the city annexed it in 1986 once it was nearly built out. Many more communities followed: First Colony, Greatwood, New Territory, Telfair, Riverstone and others, until the city counted thirteen master-planned communities across its limits and extraterritorial jurisdiction, more than any other city in Fort Bend County.
The city kept growing by annexation as much as by new construction. Its largest single annexation came December 12, 2017, when Sugar Land absorbed the already-built Greatwood and New Territory communities, pushing the city's population to 117,869 in one move.
The land itself
Sugar Land's ground has been quietly sinking for most of a century. Between 1943 and 1964, the area sank about a foot; between 1988 and 2016, it sank more than 6 feet, and the current estimated rate still runs 10 to 25 millimeters a year. The Texas Legislature created the Fort Bend Subsidence District in 1989 specifically to manage this, and the U.S. Geological Survey and Army Corps of Engineers have both studied it since.
Water sits underneath the city in three aquifers — Chicot, Evangeline and Jasper — with the first two supplying much of the municipal water for Sugar Land, Houston and Galveston alike. Two rivers of a different kind cross the surface: the Brazos River along the southwestern edge and Oyster Creek cutting through the north and east, both threaded together by the artificial lakes nearly every master-planned community here has built.
That is Sugar Land: a sugar plantation that became a company town, then a city that grew, neighborhood by neighborhood, into one of the largest suburbs in the Houston region, still sitting on ground that hasn't stopped settling.