HOUSTON—Texas might have been built by Big Oil, but Big Sugar had a head start.
In 1843, one of the "Old 300" families granted land by Stephen F. Austin - who had been entrusted with vast lands by the newly independent government of Mexico - began growing cotton, corn, and sugar cane with slave labor on swampy land next to the Brazos River. The fields were so productive that settler Nathaniel Williams built a small mill to process the woody stalks into raw sugar.
It would become, over the next century and a half, Texas' longest continually-operating business and one of the largest sugar producers on the planet - until, at the turn of the 21st century, everything came crashing down.
The sugar business a few miles outside the young town of Houston in the new state of Texas grew by consolidation in the years following the Civil War as E.H. Cunningham accumulated 12,500 acres that were leased to tenant farmers. Around 1879, he built a large refinery on the site, operating as Cunningham Sugar Company.
By that time, slavery had been abolished. But both Cunningham and his neighbor with 5,300 acres, Will Ellis, had found an affordable workaround: Convict labor leased from the state. That system of bonded servitude continued into early 20th century, when the Kempner and Eldridge families of Galveston acquired both plantations and merged them into one, which they named the Imperial Sugar Company after the Imperial Hotel in New York.
Source: www.chron.com