Unlocking the past
95 bodies found in unmarked Texas graves are likely of ex-slaves, ‘leased’ prisoners
One man’s persistence unearths a forgotten prison cemetery with a dark secret.
Today the city of Sugar Land, Texas, is a sprawling suburb southwest of Houston, home to Imperial Sugar Co., shopping malls and endless culs-de-sac.
But, more than a century ago, it was a sprawling network of sugar cane plantations and prison camps. Sugar Land was better known then as the Hellhole on the Brazos. From sun up to sun down, convicts who were leased by the state to plantation owners toiled in the fields chopping sugar cane sometimes until they “dropped dead in their tracks,” as the State Convention of Colored Men of Texas complained in 1883.
In modern-day Sugar Land it was all easy to forget — but not for one man named Reggie Moore, who couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Moore started researching Sugar Land’s slavery and convict-leasing history after spending time working as a prison guard at one of Texas’s oldest prisons. His curiosity eventually evolved into obsession. Based on what he learned, he believed that the bodies of former slaves and black prisoners were still buried in Sugar Land’s backyard. He focused his attention on a site called the Imperial State Prison Farm, the one that bore the name of the country’s premier sugar company.
For 19 years he searched for their bodies, stopping just short of sticking a shovel in the dirt himself.
“I felt like I had to be a voice for the voiceless,” said Moore, who is AfricanAmerican.
This week, his quest produced results. At the former Imperial State Prison Farm site, archaeologists have unearthed an entire plot of precise rectangular graves for 95 souls, each buried 2 to 5 feet beneath the soil in nearly disintegrated pinewood caskets. The 19thcentury cemetery was unmarked, with no vestige of its existence visible from the surface.
And it was almost “truly lost to history,” said archaeologist Reign Clark of Goshawk Environmental Consulting.
The graves were found almost by accident. The local Fort Bend Independent School District began construction on a new school at the former prison site in October. Then in February, a backhoe operator happened to see something jutting out of the dirt. He thought it was a bone.
Archaeologists called to the site began digging. Upon the eventual discovery of the 95 bodies, they began exhuming the remains in June. On Monday, they released a preliminary analysis.
Clark said they believe, almost without a doubt, that the graves belong to black prisoners — among them former slaves.
At the site, the archaeologists found chains, but found few personal effects inside the graves save for a single ring. Of the roughly two dozen intact skeletons the archaeologists have analyzed so far, all had AfricanAmerican traits, bioarchaeologist Catrina Banks Whitley said.
They were estimated to be as young as 14 and as old as 70.
The unearthed gravesite recalls one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, historians and archaeologists said. The discovery may vindicate Moore. But more crucially, he said, it vindicates the prisoners whose backbreaking work helped rebuild the state of Texas in the ruins of the post-Civil War era without so much as a proper burial to acknowledge their contributions.
“I think we’re going to be able to paint a very vivid picture of how these people lived and what they went through here,” Clark said.
The convict-leasing system proliferated all across the South in the late 19th century and into the 20th, overwhelmingly targeting black Americans picked up for offenses such as vagrancy, flirting with white women or petty theft, as historian Douglas A. Blackmon reported in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”
The prisoners were then leased by the state to private businessmen and forced to work on plantations, in coal mines and railroads or other state projects — such as building the Texas Capitol building from scratch.
In Texas, the profitable system was notorious along the Brazos River, the epicenter of the country’s sugar industry in the 19th century.
Photographs of the era show the prisoners dressed in raggedy striped prison clothing, hoisting the cane stalks from the swampy field into mule-drawn wagons and delivering them to the mills, including the “Imperial Mill.” It was the early foundation of the Imperial Sugar Co., which benefited from convict labor in the cane fields after its founding around the turn of the 20th century, according to the book “Sugar Land, Tex., and the Imperial Sugar Company.”
The prisoners chopping sugar cane were almost exclusively black and were concentrated on neighboring plantations owned by former slave drivers Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis. The site of Fort Bend ISD’s new school — and of the newly discovered graves — rests on land that was “Ellis Camp No. 1,” Clark said.
It was later renamed “Imperial State Farm Prison Camp No. 1” once the state took it over.
“When the state leased convicts out to private contractors, they had no financial interest in the health or welfare of the people working for them,” said Caleb McDaniel, a history professor at Rice University in Houston. “And so the convict-leasing system saw extremely high levels of mortality and sickness under convict lessees. If the prisoner died, they would simply go back to the state and say, ‘You owe us another prisoner.’ ”
In Texas, more than 3,500 prisoners died between 1866 and 1912, when lawmakers, shocked at the mortality, outlawed convict leasing, according to historian Robert Perkinson’s book, “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.” By his calculation, that means more AfricanAmericans died in convict leasing in the South in the same period than in lynchings.
Veronica Sopher, spokeswoman for the Fort Bend ISD, said the district is exploring the possibility of memorials for the buried prisoners. It is also exploring the possibility of reburying the 95 bodies in an existing prison cemetery on the same plot of land, the Old Imperial Farm Cemetery, where roughly 30 mostly white prisoners were buried between 1912 and 1944.
Reggie Moore is the Imperial cemetery’s volunteer guardian.
Moore said the discovery of the 95 graves has been gratifying after so many years of being the sole advocate for the nameless former slaves and convicts. He has since held memorial ceremonies for them at the Imperial cemetery, calling himself their “spokesman.”
“It was just overwhelming,” Moore said of the discovery of the graves. “And then sad at the same time, because now I know these guys are here. This really did happen.”