D rive through the Sugar Land of today, and you’ll find one of the most diverse and affluent suburbs in America, a landscape of master-planned neighborhoods and top-ranked schools laid out around man-made lakes that make up the good life in Houston’s ever-expanding suburbia.
But none of that modern comfort along this bend of the Brazos gives away that it was once one of the most punishing places in Texas, where men and women were worked to death by plantation owners and, later, a state prison that leased their labor and called it justice.
The story of how such a brutal place became one of Houston’s largest suburbs, of course, begins with the sugar.
How Sugar Land got its name
The land that became Sugar Land was granted in 1828 to Samuel M. Williams, Stephen F. Austin’s secretary, who named it Oakland Plantation for the oaks crowding along the Brazos…