Pearland and The Santa Fe Railroad

The Handbook of Texas gives Pearland a quick start. The post office opened in 1893 as Mark Belt, and that November the town took the name Pearland for its pear trees. By 1898 it had seventy-five people, a newspaper and twelve businesses, two of them hotels. Promoters pitched an agricultural Eden, and after the 1900 hurricane destroyed the fruit trees, oranges and figs filled in until the freeze of 1918. In 1914 there were twenty-three businesses, two churches and 400 people, and one teacher taught twenty-five pupils. Oil came in 1934.

What the plaque says

Pearland and The Santa Fe Railroad The Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad built a siding switch called "Mark Belt" near here in 1883 as part of its Houston to Alvin branch rail line. In 1893 William Zychlinski purchased 2560 acres in this area which he subdivided and platted in 1894. Included in Zychlinski's subdivision was the 273-acre townsite of Pearland. S. M. Christensen, president of the Southern Homestead Company, contracted to develop the townsite. As part of a plan to attract settlers to the townsite Christensen planted numerous pear and other fruit trees. In 1900 the Santa Fe Railroad built a depot nearby which soon became a gathering place for settlers to meet visitors and pick up mail and supplies. Locally produced cotton, hay, cattle, fruit and vegetables were shipped to market by railroad from the depot. Pearland's development, delayed by the devastating storm of 1900, surged about 1910 as the Allison-Richey Suburban Gardens Co. successfully promoted the area as an agricultural wonderland with vital railroad access. Oil production, cattle ranching, and hay, rice, and fig farming sustained Pearland's growth. The railroad's importance diminished and in 1972 the depot closed. It was donated to the city and moved here through the efforts of many citizens and organizations. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 9.6 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.
• Emancipation Park — 14 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 — 15 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 15 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Pearland — 1.9 mi
• Zychlinski Park — 1.9 mi
• Robert L. and Julia Martin Hunter — 2.0 mi
• Fig Industry in Friendswood — 4.5 mi