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join the Confederate States of America. After war broke out the next month, eager, young Texans flocked to fight, leaving the plantations in a precarious situation. They were under-staffed, poorly supplied and often mismanaged. Terry received a commission to form what became known as Terry’s Texas Rangers. Col. Terry made his headquarters in Houston where he commissioned 10 captains to each recruit a company of 100 men. In August, nine companies totaling 1,176 men left to join the fight in the east. The 40-year-old Terry was killed leading his men in their first charge in Kentucky. Near the end of the war, Kyle died in 1864 at age 61. His brother, Robert, and Terry’s son, A.J., took over management of the Sugar Land plantation. Times were hard and maintaining a plantation anywhere in the South became difficult, especially with the end of slavery. In Fort Bend County, it was estimated that 70 percent of the white men between the ages of 17 and 50 were gone during the war with less than half returning. For a quarter century after the war, Fort Bend County saw many of its plantations go under. Sugar Land was one of the few that survived, but barely. The labor was supplied by freed slaves and, in 1871 with the passage of a new law, convict laborers were contracted to work the fields and mills. After struggling for a long time, the heirs of Kyle and Terry sold off their plantation to Col. Edward H. Cunningham. A friend of Cunningham, Littleberry Ellis, whose father and uncle were signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, began buying nearby plantations. Eventually the two men joined their properties and formed a partnership. Roger Bollinger, the great-greatgrandson of Ellis, said he was surprised to learn that his ancestor utilized convict labor to work the plantation.
Although legal, the practice was unscrupulous and unethical. “It wasn’t just Cunningham and Ellis using convicts, that’s for sure,” he said. According to the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation, “The inmates worked in the wet sugar cane fields, many falling victim to the periodic epidemics of fevers. The brutal working conditions caused bitter convicts to call Sugar Land the ‘Hell hole on the Brazos.’” Bollinger, 67, lives in Pennsylvania but his roots are deep in Sugar Land. His mother was Rita Hadley, who was the daughter of Lenore Turner, who was the daughter of Pink Ellis, who was one of the twin daughters of Littleberry Ellis. Cunningham invested more than $1 million in a sugar refinery, a new raw-sugar mill, a paper mill, and the fourteen-mile Sugar Land Railroad in the 1890s. One of the mills built by Cunningham and Ellis became known as the Imperial mill. The partnership eventually dissolved with each man retaining his original property and Ellis getting the Imperial mill. In 1884, Ellis’s health began to fail and he turned control of his plantation over to his sons, Will and C.G. Ellis. The two brothers were not exactly good stewards of the land. Will Ellis was killed in a gunfight in 1896 and his brother was shot to death in 1906 in a gunfight with a sergeant of his convict guards. The death of C.G. Ellis left the plantation and a $240,000 debt to his wife and mother. Now bankrupt, the properties of Ellis and Cunningham were eventually purchased by I.H. Kempner and W.T. Eldridge in 1907. At that time the sugar refining process was expanded to what is now known as Imperial Holly Corp. (Editor’s note: Information for this story came from the book “Sugar Land, Texas and Imperial Sugar Company” by R.M. Armstrong, and the websites of the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation and the City of Sugar Land.)
35 H SUGAR LAND NEWCOMERS GUIDE AND VISITORS DIRECTORY 2019
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