Stafford Plantation
Sugar Land, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Stafford Plantation Tennessean William Joseph Stafford and his second wife, Martha Cartwright, moved their family to this area in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's "old 300" colony. Here they reared eight children and developed a plantation with a sugar cane mill and cotton gin. The plantation, known as Stafford's Point, produced sugar with a high molasses content and prospered even when local cotton production was low. During the Texas Revolution, Mexican troops burned the plantation buildings, but the family rebuilt, and the settlement surrounding the plantation became a commercial center, known today as Stafford. This site is thought to be the cemetery of the early Stafford Plantation. (2003)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Tennessean William Joseph Stafford brought his family here in 1822 as members of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300," the first Anglo colonists in Mexican Texas, and built a plantation with a sugar mill and cotton gin known as Stafford's Point. Its high-molasses sugar prospered even in lean cotton years, until Mexican troops burned the buildings during the Texas Revolution. The family rebuilt, and the settlement that grew around the plantation survives today as the city of Stafford; this site is believed to be its early cemetery.
Why it matters
As one of Austin's founding colonial families, the Staffords helped plant the plantation economy and Anglo settlement that would define — and trouble — nineteenth-century Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1822, the land that would become Stafford was not part of the United States at all — it was the northern frontier of newly independent Mexico, opened to Anglo-American settlement under an arrangement between the Mexican government and an American empresario named Stephen F. Austin. Colonists came with land grants and a mandate to tame a country of prairie, timber, and rich bottomland along the rivers that drain toward the Gulf.
This was the very first wave of organized Anglo settlement in Texas, a full generation before the Civil War and more than a decade before Texas was its own republic. The families who arrived then were building homesteads in a place with almost no roads, no towns, and no guarantees — under a foreign flag and among long-established Native peoples.
The fertile lands of what is now Fort Bend County drew planters because the soil and climate suited cane and cotton. Here the plantation South was being transplanted onto a Mexican frontier, and the mills and gins that rose along the creeks marked the beginning of an economy that would define the region for the next hundred years.
People & events
William Joseph Stafford, a Tennessean, brought his second wife, Martha Cartwright, and their family to this area in 1822 as members of Austin's "Old 300" — the first three hundred families granted land in his colony. On this ground they raised eight children and built a plantation they called Stafford's Point.
What set the place apart was its sugar. The Stafford cane mill produced sugar with an unusually high molasses content, and the plantation prospered even in years when the surrounding cotton crop faltered — a hedge that made Stafford's Point a fixture of the local economy while other operations rose and fell with a single commodity.
Then came the Texas Revolution. Mexican troops moving through the area burned the plantation's buildings, and for a moment the family's decade of work went up in smoke. But the Staffords rebuilt. The settlement that gathered around the reconstructed plantation grew into a genuine commercial center — and it carries the family name to this day as the city of Stafford. This site, the marker tells us, is believed to be the cemetery of that early plantation, the ground where its people were laid to rest.
Its place in the American story
The Old 300 occupy a founding place in the American story of westward expansion — the leading edge of a migration that would carry the United States, and its institutions, all the way to the Pacific. The Staffords were among those first families, and their plantation shows exactly what that expansion planted: not just farms and towns, but the plantation economy and the system of enslaved labor that underwrote it.
Their story also captures the collision that made Texas. Anglo colonists invited onto Mexican soil eventually broke with Mexico, and the Revolution that followed — with Mexican troops burning homesteads like this one — was the violent hinge between Mexican Texas and the Republic, and ultimately American statehood.
And there is the quieter American pattern of how a place becomes a place. A single family's mill and gin drew neighbors, commerce, and finally a town that outlasted the plantation itself. Countless American cities began exactly this way — around one enterprising household's foothold on the frontier — and Stafford wears that origin in its very name.
If you visit
This is a site to approach with a sense of how deep the roots go. When you stand here, you are on ground tied to 1822 — before the Alamo, before the Republic, before Texas was American at all. That alone reframes the sprawl of the modern suburb around you.
The marker identifies this as the likely resting place of the early Stafford Plantation community, so treat it as you would any old burying ground: with quiet and care. Look for the lay of the land and imagine the cane fields and the mill that once made this a center of local life, and remember that the buildings you'd have seen were burned in the Revolution and raised again by a determined family.
For a road trip, Stafford sits in the historic heart of Fort Bend County's plantation and sugar country, and this marker is a good first stop for understanding why the towns here are where they are. Let it set the stage: the city's name, the streets, the whole settlement grew out of the story on this stone.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · William Joseph Stafford
- · Martha Cartwright Stafford
- · Stephen F. Austin
Related events
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
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