Telfair, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a state prison farm became one of Sugar Land's newest communities
More about this in Telfair
Telfair sits inside Sugar Land, built along the Southwest Freeway with its main entrance on University Boulevard. It's one of the newest large communities in the city, and its story is unlike any of its neighbors, because almost none of Telfair existed before 2005 — the entire footprint spent most of the twentieth century as a working state prison farm. This page is a plain guide to that history. For the full record, the Telfair page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
From prison farm to planned community
For most of the 1900s, the land that is now Telfair belonged to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Central Prison Unit, part of what was once called the Imperial Prison Farm. In 2002, the state sold the 2,018-acre parcel to Newland Communities, a developer based in San Diego. Sugar Land annexed the land into the city in July 2004 — an unusual move at the time, since the city had previously only annexed areas that were already built out, not raw land waiting on a developer.
Newland broke ground in February 2005 and named the new community after Telfair Square in Savannah, Georgia. The first houses were ready by spring 2006, and the build-out moved fast from there: by March 2010, more than 1,600 of the 2,800 houses then planned were already standing, a pace helped along by a 10% sales increase in 2009 even as new-home sales fell across most of the rest of Houston.
What the prison left behind
The community didn't erase its past — it built around it. The Imperial State Farm Cemetery, where inmates were buried between 1912 and the 1930s, still sits inside a grass field in Telfair's northwest section today. University Boulevard, the road running through the center of the community, used to be called Flanagan Road, named for R. J. "Buck" Flanagan, the warden who ran the Imperial Prison Farm for three decades until his death in 1949.
The most visible reminder is a former inmate dormitory called Two Camp. It had broken windows and loose brick when Newland took over the site, but instead of tearing it down, the developer put on a new roof and restored the building. In 2009, after a $3 million renovation, it reopened as the Houston Museum of Natural Science Sugar Land, a 43,000-square-foot museum that the developer donated, land and all, to the City of Sugar Land.
A community recognized while still under construction
In 2010, the Houston Business Journal gave Telfair three landmark awards in a single year — one for best residential community, and two specifically for the Two Camp museum conversion. That recognition arrived while Telfair was still actively building, and the momentum kept going: in 2012, Texas Instruments announced it was moving its Fort Bend County operations from Stafford into the Telfair area, with the new building finished and open by early 2014.
The community today
Telfair's housing stock now carries a median build year of 2009 across roughly 2,878 single-family homes averaging around 3,580 square feet — a far narrower age range than most Sugar Land neighborhoods, since almost the entire community went up within one decade. Telfair Central Hall, a 9,545-square-foot community center, was designed to echo the look of the old Two Camp building, tying the community's newest gathering space back to the land's original use.
That is Telfair: a Texas prison farm that a San Diego developer turned into one of Sugar Land's fastest-built communities, without erasing the history still sitting in its own front yard.