Sugar Land Independent School District No. 17

The company town grew from older plantations. In the 1890s E. H. Cunningham invested more than $1 million in a refinery, a mill and the Sugar Land Railroad, and much of the labor was leased from the nearby state prison farms. Inmates worked the wet cane fields, many dying in fever epidemics, and the brutal conditions led convicts to call the place the "Hell hole on the Brazos." From 1906 to 1908 Isaac H. Kempner and William T. Eldridge bought the plantations and made Sugar Land a company town for Imperial Sugar. It was incorporated in 1959.

What the plaque says

Sugar Land Independent School District No. 17 A public school was established as early as 1912 for families moving to the company town of Sugar Land. In 1918, the State Legislature created Sugar Land Independent School District No. 17, with the requirement that at least two of the seven board members be women. Mary Anna Collins Woods served as the first school superintendent. Sugar company engineer M. R. Wood designed the school and served as school board president. In 1959 the district was merged with schools in Missouri City and Stafford to form the Fort Bend Independent School District. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 17 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

• Sugar Land First United Methodist Church — 0.8 mi
• Hodge's Bend Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• Stafford's Point — 2.9 mi
• Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado, First Railroad in Texas — 4.6 mi