Hell-Hole of the Brazos into Model Company Town: Architecture and Urban Space in Texas’s Sugar Land

Sugar Land flourished as a model company town for the Imperial Sugar Company, the first sugar refinery in Texas and the oldest extant business in the state. But before it became in the 1920s one of the “best planned and equipped communities” in Texas for its size, Sugar Land had been called the “hell-hole of the Brazos,” defined by its dependence on convict labor and its identity as a segregated community. The latter continued even after the improvements of the early twentieth century. In its heyday, Sugar Land demonstrated industrial features and residential characteristics like other sugar towns in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Now considered “one of the fastest growing cities in America,” Sugar Land has lost its historic identity and is easily mistaken as one of Houston’s suburbs. Its industrial core, closed in 2002, and included in the National Registry in 2017, has been on the cusp of several redevelopment plans. This study of Sugar Land focuses on how sugar production and changing attitudes towards the work force were central to the generation of housing and urban form for white, African American, and Hispanic workers.