Fulshear: A Plantation Town's Modern Boom

Fulshear traces its name and its origins to Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, who received a Mexican land grant along the fertile Brazos River bottoms in 1824. On that rich soil the Fulshear family built a cotton-and-sugar plantation worked by enslaved people — a cotton gin, a flour mill, and even a horse-racing operation — a typical antebellum Fort Bend County estate. When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railway came through in 1888, the town of Fulshear was platted around trackside, and families moved in from nearby Pittsville, which had refused the railroad. For most of the 20th century Fulshear stayed tiny — barely a hundred people in the 1930s. Then Houston's sprawl reached it: the population that lingered around 250 has exploded past 60,000 in recent years, one of the fastest-growing communities in the state. This drive links the markers of that long arc — the founding family, the pioneer households, and the cemeteries where the plantation era and the freedmen's community both rest.