Fig Industry in Friendswood

Friendswood's name honors the Quakers. English Friends who had moved from Kansas to Estacado, on the Texas plains, in 1880 found the country intolerable, and Francis Jacob Brown went looking for land near the coast. In 1895 he negotiated with J. C. League for more than 1,500 acres. Pine felled by the 1900 hurricane built Friendswood Academy, which also served as the church. The community stayed predominantly Quaker until 1958, and in 1963 it became the only dry town in Galveston County.

What the plaque says

Fig Industry in Friendswood Friendswood was established as a Quaker colony by Frank J. Brown and Thomas H. Lewis in 1895. Among the colony's early settlers was former Kansas farmer Nereus Stout. Stout became a highly acclaimed horticulturist and is believed to be the first farmer to grow figs commercially in Galveston County. J. C. Carpenter established Galveston County's first fig preserving plant in Friendswood about 1910. His main supplier was the Stout farm, but in time his inventory of fig suppliers expanded as figs became a popular and reliable cash crop. By the early 1920s Galveston County accounted for half of all the figs grown in a 7-county area along Texas' Gulf Coast. In 1930 one-third of the county's leading figs producers were from Friendswood, a community of fewer than 300 residents. Friendswood's two fig preserving plants supported a network of nurserymen and orchardists, and provided employment for many of Friendswood's residents, including the years during the 1930s Great Depression. Fig production along the Texas Gulf Coast declined after World War II; Friendswood's fig orchards began disappearing in the 1950s. A commercial fig preserving plant in Friendswood, the last of its kind still in operation on the Texas Gulf Coast, closed in 1968. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 6.0 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Emancipation Park — 18 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Pearland and The Santa Fe Railroad — 4.5 mi
• Contributions to the Texas Rice Industry by Seito and Kiyoaki Saibara — 5.3 mi
• Ellington Field — 5.8 mi
• League Park — 6.0 mi