... Integral to cotton farming was slavery, which Austin encouraged by granting settlers 80 acres of extra land for each slave they brought with them. Texas would become one of the biggest cotton-producing regions in North America, but .. sugar .. transformed the fertile banks of the Lower Brazos. In 1838 three brothers, Matthew, Samuel, and Nathaniel Williams, started one of the first sugar plantations in Texas on property in what is now Sugar Land that had been granted to their family by Austin himself. By the 1850s, sugar was a major industry in Fort Bend, Matagorda, Wharton, and Brazoria counties ... Like cotton plantations, sugarcane plantations relied heavily on slave labor. Harvesting cane was even more arduous than picking cotton. Slaves worked around the clock during harvest season to cut the sugarcane, press out the cane juice, boil it down, and then pack the finished product onto trains to be shipped around the country ...
Blood and Sugar
by MICHAEL HARDY
JANUARY 2017
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/sugar-land-slave-convict-labor-history/
... The greatest concentration of large slave plantations was along the lower Brazos and Colorado rivers in Brazoria, Matagorda, Fort Bend, and Wharton counties. Truly giant slaveholders such as Robert and D. G. Mills, who owned more than 300 slaves in 1860 (the largest holding in Texas), had plantations in this area, and the population resembled that of the Old South's famed Black Belt ...
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yps01
... Compared to other Deep South states, Texas has comparatively few plantations standing as historical beacons ... creditors dismantled many of the plantations of eastern Texas, and what they left was largely destroyed by a series of hurricanes and fires near the turn of the century. Today many are the sites of sprawling prisons ...
The Cotton Kings of Texas
BY RICHARD PARKER APRIL 24, 2012 12:30 PM
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/the-cotton-kings-of-texas/
MONTE VERDI .. located high on a hill in Rusk County Texas ... is an architectural showplace built in the Greek Revival style and was completed in 1856. The mansion was built by Julien Sidney Devereux and was situated on his 10,721 acre plantation ...
http://www.monteverdiplantation.com/
Liendo Plantation, a beautiful Greek Revival style plantation home, was built in 1853 as the centerpiece to one of Texas’ earliest cotton plantations ...
http://liendoplantation.com/liendo/
Founded in 1842, the Jackson Plantation was actually the second of three plantations developed by Major Abner Jackson. Originally known as "Lake Place," it was a bustling sugar plantation that stretched over 6400 acres and was worked by over 80 slaves ...
http://www.lakejacksonmuseum.org/index.php?page=plantation-site
Our rich history began in Southeast Texas in 1843 as the Oakland Plantation. The plantation's sugar crop had grown large enough to justify the installation of a commercial raw sugar grinding mill, establishing the site of the future Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, Texas ...
Imperial Sugar Legacy
http://www.imperialsugar.com/sugar-101/imperial-sugar-legacy
= new reply since forum marked as read