Duke Community

The plaque names the Sugar Land Railway as Duke's reason for being; its record shows how small the line was. It was chartered on April 14, 1893, for E. H. Cunningham and Company, to run from Sugar Land to Arcola and meet the International and Great Northern, and J. H. B. House of Duke sat on the first board. Crews laid fourteen miles in 1893 and 1894. In 1895 the road earned $200 from passengers and $17,000 from freight, with one locomotive and one car. A new connection in 1912 let the company abandon the four miles to Arcola.

What the plaque says

Duke Community In 1824, Old Three-Hundred settlers David Fitzgerald, Thomas Barnett and Moses Shipman received land grants in this area. Fitzgerald fought at Anahuac in 1832; Barnett signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. This location on the northeastern high bluff of Clear Lake, an ample supply of water for steam engines, led to the construction of railroads here by the mid-1800s. Duke was terminus of the Sugar Land Railway for loading sugarcane. The area developed as a major shipping point with a store, hotel, livestock pen, and sugar mills. It was named for Duke Hessey, the storekeeper. Duke had a post office from 1883 to 1922; the first Postmaster was J.R. Fenn. Today, Duke Cemetery is the only remnant of this once-thriving community. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 12 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 16 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• The Menil Collection — 16 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 16 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• The Fitzgerald and Fenn Families — steps away
• St. John Missionary Baptist Church — 6.3 mi
• Almeda — 7.4 mi
• Stafford Municipal School District — 7.6 mi