The Brazos Canal
Lake Jackson, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Chartered in 1841, the Brazos Canal Company was the result of local landowners' efforts to build canals to connect inland plantations to Gulf shipping ports. Construction began in 1847 on a canal, referred to locally as the "slave ditch" because it was dug by the slaves of company owners. A one-mile section, twenty-four feet wide and three feet deep, took two years to complete. The project was soon abandoned. A rival company, the Galveston and Brazos Navigation Company, completed a canal between the Brazos River and Galveston Bay in 1856. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Chartered in 1841, the Brazos Canal Company grew out of planters' hunger to link their inland Brazos-bottom plantations to Gulf shipping. Construction began in 1847 on a channel dug by enslaved people — known locally by the grim name "slave ditch" — but after two years of labor only a single mile was finished, and the project was abandoned in favor of a rival company's canal completed in 1856.
Why it matters
The canal exposes the enslaved labor and cotton wealth beneath Texas' antebellum transportation dreams, a plantation economy literally dug by the hands it held in bondage.
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