Zychlinski Park

Who bought what is not settled. The City of Pearland says William Zychlinski bought 2,560 acres around the Mark Belt outpost in 1892 and platted the town in 1894. In 1895 the Southern Homestead Company took over promoting Pearland to farm-belt settlers, and after the 1900 hurricane the Allison-Richey company laid out its Suburban Gardens west of the tracks. The park therefore comes from the first of three successive sales pitches for the same flat prairie. Through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Pearland's population stayed in the low hundreds.

What the plaque says

Zychlinski Park Named for the Polish nobleman who came to Brazoria County in the late 1880s and fell in love with the flowering pear trees in an area he called Pearland, Zychlinski Park was included in the original town site. Captain Wilhelm Zychlinski bought 5991 acres of land by a railroad siding switch at a station called Mark Belt. Shortly after completing his town plat, Zychlinski sold most of his holdings and disappeared, leaving his lawyer, J. W. O'Brian, to file the map of Pearland with the county Hall of Records on September 26, 1894. In 1911, land developers Allison and Richey set up offices in the Suburban Gardens Hotel. To promote Pearland, the firm supported a music band and outfitted the Suburban Gardens baseball team. For nearly two generations the people of Pearland played baseball in Zychlinski Park. Old-timers have recalled long Sunday afternoons on the sidelines and overtime games illuminated by car headlights. During the depression era, baseball in the park was a popular escape. Only World War II stopped baseball in Zychlinski Park. In 1946 a group of citizens signed a petition to allow the park to be used by the school district, and until the late 1990s it was the playground of the C. J. Harris Elementary School. (1998) Incise: Pearland Independent School District (1996-1997) James Schleider, superintendent Board of Trustees: Glen Moreau, president; Phil Peevey, vice president; Ed Thompson, secretary; Lilliam Smith; Glenn Garrison; Rosella Webb; Jim Watson

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 11 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 — 13 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 — 13 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 — 13 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 — steps away
• Robert L. and Julia Martin Hunter — 0.2 mi
• Pearland and The Santa Fe Railroad — 1.9 mi
• Genoa United Methodist Church — 6.3 mi