The Sugar & Cotton Coast: Plantations of the Brazos

The rich bottomlands of the lower Brazos River were the plantation heartland of early Texas. Some of Stephen F. Austin's first colonists — the Old Three Hundred — took up leagues of this fertile soil in the 1820s, and by the mid-nineteenth century the Brazos bottoms held some of the largest sugar and cotton plantations in the state, worked by enslaved people whose forced labor built the region's wealth. This driving trail follows that landscape from Sugar Land, whose very name records the crop that made it, down through the old plantation country around Richmond and out to the coast at Brazoria and the mouth of the Brazos. Along the way it takes in the story honestly: the sugar refineries and grand family ranches, and also the convict-leasing system that continued to extract forced labor here for decades after emancipation, and the plantations where archaeologists have worked to recover the lives of the enslaved. It is a trail through beautiful, difficult country — the ground where much of Texas's cotton-and-sugar economy, and the human cost behind it, was written.