Historical Marker
Stafford Plantation
Sugar Land, Fort Bend County · Texas
Erected 2003
The plaque's sugar plantation ran on enslaved labor, and the Handbook says plainly how hard the family worked to keep it so. The 1826 census counted eight enslaved people in William Stafford's household. Fearing the Mexican government would free them, Martha Cartwright Stafford spent much of her time moving them back and forth across the Sabine. In June 1835 Stafford killed a man named Moore and fled to the United States. In December 1838 fifty Fort Bend citizens petitioned Congress to let him return, and the House recommended clemency. He died at Stafford's Point on September 23, 1840.
What the plaque says
Stafford Plantation Stafford Plantation Tennessean William Joseph Stafford and his second wife, Martha Cartwright, moved their family to this area in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's "old 300" colony. Here they reared eight children and developed a plantation with a sugar cane mill and cotton gin. The plantation, known as Stafford's Point, produced sugar with a high molasses content and prospered even when local cotton production was low. During the Texas Revolution, Mexican troops burned the plantation buildings, but the family rebuilt, and the settlement surrounding the plantation became a commercial center, known today as Stafford. This site is thought to be the cemetery of the early Stafford Plantation. (2003)
Where it stands
29.60578, -95.58543 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 14 miThe 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 — 14 miJohn 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 — 15 miAn 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.
- Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 15 miA 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.