Ghosts of Sugar Land

The Old Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery in Sugar Land on Saturday, March 15. To view or purchase this photo and others like it, go to HCNPics.com. The Old Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery in Sugar Land on Saturday, March 15. To view or purchase this photo and others like it, go to HCNPics.com. Photo: Alan Warren Photo: Alan Warren Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Ghosts of Sugar Land 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

Drive just west of Highway 6 on US 90A, and a quick left on Easton Avenue will take you to the award-winning Telfair. One of the Sugar Land area’s fastest growing master planned communities, Telfair features a wide array of family-friendly amenities, from tennis courts and water parks to yoga and art classes at its Central Hall fitness center, making its single-family homes some of the most sought after in Greater Houston. But before it became known for rising home values and quality of life, the area was the site of one of the most tragic, brutal chapters in Sugar Land’s history.

A century ago, the area was ruefully known as the “Hellhole on the Brazos” by the prisoners who worked the Imperial State Prison Farm, where untold numbers died from sickness and infrequent and spoiled food rations. If they failed to meet their quotas or broke a rule, they were beaten, starved, whipped or relegated to a darkened cell for days on end.

After emancipation, a loophole in the 13th Amendment retained legal slavery for those who’d been duly convicted of a crime. In 1867, Texas began leasing out its convicts to labor for private companies, and former plantations across the state were transformed into prison farms. The vast majority of the men and women who toiled on them were African-Americans, either the children of slaves or former slaves themselves, who came from states like Arkansas and Louisiana as well as from across Texas. With the Postbellum Texas economy in shambles and the basis of its political economy now illegal, Archaeologist/Historical Anthropologist Dr. Fred McGhee says this was no coincidence.

“How are you going to now take almost 5 million human beings who were previously in bondage, who have no interest whatsoever in working on plantations where they were enslaved, and basically force [them] into involuntary servitude?” McGhee asked. “How are you going to compel them to labor for you? This is how it was done.”

Convict leasing’s popularity in Texas caught on gradually over the mid-to-late 19th century, but became a well established practice for the state by the 1890s, being utilized to construct the state capital, operate the Ellis Plantation's newly-built sugar mill, and perform the back-breaking labor of cultivating its surrounding cane fields. The practice was greatly facilitated by the “Black Codes,” a series of openly racist laws passed by southern states in the years after the Civil War, which ensnared free African-Americans into involuntary servitude for crimes like vagrancy. Texas Slave Descendent Society founder Reginald Moore, himself a former Texas Department of Corrections employee at the Jester Unit in Richmond, said once a black person became entangled in the convict labor leasing system, the Black Codes - also known as the “Pig Law” - made it virtually impossible to escape.

“They would re-incarcerate you [after being released], and would be able to get the free labor by saying you were just a vagrant that didn’t have a job and was fresh out [of jail],” Moore said. “That would be reason to enslave you again, to put you in the system. With the Pig Law, if you got caught stealing a pig, you got 15 years. The pig could have been a wild, feral hog.”

Moore is the guardian/caretaker of the Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery, a collection of 20 or so crumbling headstones encircled by a fence in the middle of a - currently - undeveloped piece of land. They’re hardly a full representation of the scores who died in the area from the late 1800s to the 1910s, the decade when a lawsuit from Texas made the practice illegal. For many who died, they were simply buried where they fell.

Moore, McGhee and others are pushing to commemorate the site’s painful, but important history beyond the motley set of grave markers- a history they accuse the city, county and state of attempting to erase.

The second installment of this article, "The specter of Sugar Land's past," was published in the March 26, 2014, edition of the Sugar Land Sun.

The story's final installment, "Activists at odds with city over cemetery, former site of Imperial State Prison Farm," appeared in the April 3, 2014, edition of the Sugar Land Sun.