Planned museum to tell ‘company town’ story
Bill Little remembers when life in Sugar Land revolved around the Imperial Sugar Co.
In 1957, the Ohio native, then 26, moved to Sugar Land to work in Imperial Sugar’s accounting department and soon learned that the company provided much more than a paycheck.
Constable services, lowcost housing, the community’s shops and a quality high school were provided by the company and Sugarland Industries, the entity that operated Imperial Sugar’s farm, ranch and mercantile interests.
Until 1959, Sugar Land was a company town of 2,000 residents and four square miles, surrounded by fields of cotton, alfalfa and maize.
“It was a benevolent company town, similar to Hershey, Pennsylvania and some of the major company towns in the East,” said Little, who became Sugar Land’s second mayor in 1961. “We knew everybody and everybody knew each other, and you never had to think about locking the doors or anything like that. It was just a friendly place.”
Come fall, this period will be showcased in the first museum exclusively about the city’s history.
Called the Sugar Land Heritage Museum, it will be at the site of the Imperial Sugar Refinery off U.S. 90A where Little and his neighbors worked in the 1950s.
The museum will give a full scope of Sugar Land’s history, dividing it into periods covering from prehistoric time through plantation days to master-planned developments, said Dennis Parmer,
executive director for the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit group behind the museum.
The “company town” period, 1908-1959, will take up over a third of the roughly 4,000 square feet of exhibit space, which is fitting because that period distinguishes Sugar Land from other Fort Bend County cities, said Claire Rogers, executive director of the Fort Bend County Museum Association in Richmond.
The Sugar Land museum will be part of a new mixed-use development on the site of the former refinery, which will include a hotel, shopping center and housing.
The museum will be on the second floor of a brick building that dates to the 1950s. When the refinery was still in use, the building was where workers kept containers used in the packaging process.
Until the company closed in 2003, the site was used as a refinery for more than 100 years.
Right now, construction is underway for the Heritage Museum and a children’s museum that will be on the ground floor of the same building.
In the museum’s temporary office and exhibit space on the Imperial Sugar site, Parmer combs through artifacts donated by families or taken from the refinery site before construction started.
Parmer has some temporary exhibits on display in the foundation’s current office space, including photos dating to the turn of the century and one of the stainless steel Imperial Sugar crowns that used to be on gateposts at the entrance to the refinery.
In a back room are hundreds of photographs and maps that Parmer and volunteers are sorting and plan to record in digital form on a computer. In a side room is a collection of railroad tracks that Parmer will use as part of an exhibit on the role of the railroad in Sugar Land.
On one wall is an aerial photograph of what was Sugar Land’s downtown area in the 1950s.
That’s what Sugar Land looked like when Little arrived: U.S. 90A bordered a commercial area containing a shopping center, offices, movie theater and two restaurants, all across from the refinery and owned by Imperial Sugar and Sugarland Industries.
“You could buy everything from a John Deere tractor to a bail of cotton to a sack full of groceries to a prescription drug, and it would come out at one bill at the end of the month,” Little said.
The photo shows the neighborhood called “the Hill” where Little and his wife rented a six-room frame house from the company. The house was two stop signs and a stoplight away from the refinery.
Behind the refinery is another neighborhood, now called Mayfield Park, where black and Hispanic families lived in wooden homes without indoor plumbing. Sugar Land was segregated through the end of the company town period.
The Sugar Land museum came about because of a developer’s agreement written by the city’s elected officials after the Imperial Sugar refinery closed.
“When the refinery closed in 2003, there was anxiety within the community of how this area was going to redevelop,” said Parmer, who was on City Council from 2003-09. “As a resident I had concern. As a council member I had concern.”
The agreement Parmer and other council members wrote was that the property’s future developer had to preserve three buildings: the water tower, the eight-story brick char house and the three-bay warehouse. The developer would also have to make space for a museum on the site.
In 2008, the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation was created to oversee the museum and continue preservation of history and heritage in the area.
Johnson Development, which is responsible for the infrastructure for the site, ended up preserving several more buildings, including the two-story container building that will house the museum.
Sugar Land’s legacy as a company town continues to affect development. Unlike other Fort Bend County cities, where land was divided into parcels, the fact that one company, Imperial Sugar, owned huge swaths of acreage meant it had larger and more master-planned communities such as First Colony than other areas, Rogers said.
Sugar Land’s main shopping district has shifted from the shopping center by the refinery — now an empty building — to Town Square and First Colony Mall. But Little hopes the Imperial Sugar development, including new housing and the Heritage Museum, will make the area around U.S. 90 A a Fort Bend County destination again.
“It will make (Sugar Land) a more complete city,” Little said.