The Sugar Land Refinery
Sugar Land, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Stephen F. Austin's colonists brought sugar cane to Fort Bend County in the 1820s. The Sugar Land area was once part of Oakland Plantation, where Nathaniel (1800-84) and Matthew Williams (1805-52) planted sugar cane about 1840. They began processing the cane in 1843 using a horse-powered mill and open-air cooking kettles. In 1853 the plantation and mill were purchased by William J. Kyle (1803-64) and Benjamin F. Terry (1821-61). They improved the mill and promoted a railroad for the area, which they named Sugar Land. Terry later helped organize the famed Confederate cavalry unit, Terry's Texas Rangers, and was killed in the Civil War (1861-65). After the war, the operation was sold to Edward H. Cunningham (1835-1912), who expanded the sugar mill into a refinery. W. T. Eldridge (1862-1932) and Galveston businessman I. H. Kempner, Sr. (1873-1967) purchased the refinery in 1907. They began importing raw sugar to operate the refinery year-round because local cane was available only seasonally and in decreasing quantities in the early 1900s. Named by Kempner for the Imperial Hotel in New York City, the Imperial Sugar Company and the City of Sugar Land have grown steadily. During the 1970s, the Imperial Sugar Company produced more than three million pounds of refined cane sugar daily.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Sugar cane came to Fort Bend County with Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the 1820s, and by the 1840s the Williams brothers were boiling it in open kettles on Oakland Plantation. Successive owners — Kyle and Terry, then Cunningham after the Civil War, and finally Kempner and Eldridge in 1907 — grew a horse-powered mill into the Imperial Sugar Company, which named the town Sugar Land. One early partner, Benjamin Terry, raised the Confederate cavalry unit Terry's Texas Rangers and died in the war.
Why it matters
Imperial Sugar turned a plantation crop into an industrial empire, and the town it built remains one of Texas's clearest examples of a company shaping a whole community.
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Related people
- · Stephen F. Austin
- · Benjamin F. Terry
- · I. H. Kempner, Sr.
- · W. T. Eldridge
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sugar Land
Sugar Land, TX
Founded in 1853 and named for the sugar mill and plantation that B. F. Terry and W. J. Kyle bought with fortunes made in the California Gold Rush, Sugar Land grew into the home of Texas's only cane sugar refinery. Its founders raised Terry's Texas Rangers, one of the Confederacy's famed cavalry units, at the start of the Civil War. In later years the surrounding land became known for its prison farms.
Edward R. and Ann Taylor
Houston, TX
Edward Ruthven Taylor, born in 1845, came of age in a Houston cotton and education family and returned from schooling in New York to fight for the Confederacy, serving with Waul's Texas Legion at Vicksburg, where he was captured and fell ill. Back home he fell in love with Ann, a young woman his family had enslaved; unable to marry legally, the couple built a farm at Pierce Junction and raised a large family together. Ann died in 1909, and when oil was struck on the family land in 1921, the fortune passed to their children, who later donated the original homestead to the City of Houston.
Sugar Land Auditorium
Sugar Land, TX
Built in 1917 and designed in the Mission Revival style by Imperial Sugar Company engineer M. R. Wood, this auditorium anchored a crescent-shaped, eleven-building school complex and is the oldest public building still in use in Sugar Land. Over the decades it hosted films, stage shows, rooftop socials, and graduations, and once held the school superintendent's office and a janitor's apartment. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1992.
Sugar Land First United Methodist Church
Sugar Land, TX
Methodist worship began informally in Sugar Land around 1910, and in 1918 the Imperial Sugar Company donated Church Park so the town's Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Catholic congregations could each build a house of worship. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized here in 1919, its first frame sanctuary graced by a stained-glass "Jesus Praying in the Garden" window that has been carried into every sanctuary since. As membership grew, the congregation moved and rebuilt across the decades, culminating in a 936-seat brick sanctuary in 1999. The church's long life mirrors the growth of a sugar company town into a modern Houston-area city.