The city of Sugar Land will close on a deal to purchase Central Unit Prison and its accompanying land from the Texas Department of Corrections July 29, setting up a future for the property much different than its past. Central Unit Prison closed in 2011 but has a storied history, dating back to the 1870s when prisoners worked in brutal conditions on sugar cane plantations.
Following the Civil War when Texas could not afford to keep its prisoners in Huntsville, the state sought to lease convicts to planters, said Theresa Jach, a Houston Community College history professor who studied Texas prison farms.
In 1878, convicts from across the state were leased to Imperial Sugar owners Col. Edward H. Cunningham and Col. Littleberry Ambrose Ellis, according to “The Texas Department of Justice’s Central Unit Main Building and its Historical Significance” by Don Hudson.
Texas received $75,000 from the leasing deal while Cunningham and Ellis could also lease out prisoners to other planters, Jach said.
“In 1880, [Cunningham and Ellis] had over 1,000 convicts that they were working on their own plantations,” she said. “Then there were about 1,100 more that they were leasing out to other planters, so they’re making tons and tons of money doing this.”
Jach said the conditions were deplorable, the work was hard and prisoners died as a result.
The property includes a cemetery for inmates without families to claim them.
She said prisoners were separated by work ability and race, but it was mostly black prisoners incarcerated for petty theft who were working the fields, Jach said.
“The average lifespan of a convict leased on a sugar plantation is about seven years, so it’s really brutal,” she said. “There’s a lot of horrible mistreatment going on and so the state starts to think, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we owned the farms, and we worked the convicts and grew the sugar and make all of the money?’”
Cunningham and Ellis sold the Imperial farm to the state in 1908, and sugar from the land was processed at Imperial Sugar on Hwy. 90.
The state constructed the Central Unit Prison’s Main Building that stands today in 1932 for $350,000.
Until then, inmates lived in out buildings that had vermin and often flooded, according to Hudson. Over time, prison work moved away from agriculture as a means of rehabilitation and focused on vocational endeavors beginning in the 1960s.
“Convicts worked from ‘can till can’t’ in extremely filthy and brutal environments until the 1960s,” said Sandra Rogers, curator of collections at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. “This was true for Blue Ridge [in Missouri City], Retrieve, Ramsey, Darrington, Clemens, Eastham, Harlem [now Jester State Prison farm] and Ferguson farms.”
The city of Sugar Land plans to clear 96 existing buildings on the property and use the land for a Sugar Land Regional Airport expansion, a public safety training center and a business park.
The Main Building will remain on the property. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark in 2003.
Phil Wagner, the city of Sugar Land’s public and private partnerships manager, said there are no definite plans for public tours of Central Unit yet.
“The main building we haven’t identified a plan for preservation yet but we understand there is a public interest,” Wagner said.
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