On the surface, Houston’s Long Point Road is a typical stretch of concrete bisecting an aging sprawl of manufacturers and warehouses, garden apartments, neighborhoods of 1950s-to-’80s ranch houses and low-slung strip malls fronted by parking lots. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that it has been shaped by global history: the German revolutions of 1848, the Mexican Revolution, Latin American’s Cold War politics, the rise of OPEC, oil booms and busts, the authoritarian regime of South Korean leader Park Chung-hee (1961–79) and much more. You’ll also discover that it is one Houston’s great food roads.

Traveling east to west as a main artery for Spring Branch, Long Point begins at Hempstead Highway, where an old grain elevator looms over ramshackle warehouse-based businesses and backyards with chickens. It ends 5.3 miles later just past Gessner, when Long Point enters a residential neighborhood and becomes Shadow Oak Drive. Between those points lies a vast array of restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses primarily owned by or catering to Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Koreans—just a few of the immigrant populations that make Houston the most diverse city in the United States.

But it’s also a road rooted in Houston’s history, especially its long history of immigrants playing key roles in its food systems. In 1839, Jacob and Dorothea Schroeder became the first German immigrants to settle in what became Spring Branch, which is named after a tributary of Buffalo Bayou. Other German families soon followed, many escaping revolution and oppressive principalities. They set up small-scale farms to produce vegetables, corn, dairy and livestock, which some hauled down Washington Road (now Hempstead Highway) to sell at Houston’s City Hall Market House and to the wholesalers on Produce Row.

By 1854, there was a large enough German population to build a log cabin sanctuary for St. Peter’s Lutheran on the wagon trail that would become Long Point. The community continued to grow throughout the 19th century as schoolteachers, blacksmiths, bakers and sawmill operators joined the farmers. These German homesteads eventually became early links in a loose ring of farms, many operated by immigrants, that surrounded Houston and helped supply it with produce, meat and dairy.

According to historical documents provided by Dan Worrall of the Harris County Historical Commission, what would become Long Point was first surveyed in 1890. It was to run from the Houston & Texas Central Railroad to Long Point, a now-submerged feeder for Buffalo Bayou that gave the road its name. Construction on the road began shortly after.

The area remained primarily rural until the 1950s, when the city of Houston’s exponential population growth—between 1890 and 1960 the population grew from 27,557 to 938,219—reached Spring Branch. In 1962, the Houston Chronicle took poignant photos of Arnold and Etta Hillendahl, descendants of one of the area’s first German families, farming on Long Point as a Kmart was being built nearby.