RICHMOND, TEXAS. Richmond, the county seat of Fort Bend
County, is on the Brazos River fifteen miles southwest of
Houston. The city's transportation links include U.S.
highways 90A and 59, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. In early 1822 a
group of twelve to fifteen men led by William W. Little
camped in the vicinity of the present city and were soon
followed by other members of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three
Hundred. A log fort built at the bend in the Brazos River
became the nucleus of a settlement, which came to be known
as Fort Bend, or the "Fort Settlement." The community was
evacuated in 1836 during the Runaway Scrape. In early 1837
the town of Richmond was established by Robert Eden Handy
and his business partner, William Lusk, and as early as
April the partners were advertising to sell lots in the
town. Named after Richmond, England, the town was first
incorporated by the Republic of Texas in May 1837; in
December, when Fort Bend County was formed, Richmond became
its seat of government. In January 1839 a Methodist
Episcopal church was organized, and in April the town's
first newspaper, the weekly Richmond Telescope and Texas
Literary Register, began publishing. The town's early
residents included some of the best known Texans of the
period, including Erastus (Deaf) Smith and Jane Long;
Mirabeau B. Lamar lived on a plantation within the present
limits of the city. By 1851 Richmond included a brick
courthouse, two stores, a Masonic Hall, the Methodist
church, and the Richmond Male and Female Academy. A yellow
fever epidemic swept through Richmond in 1853, but its
future seemed assured in 1855, when the Buffalo Bayou,
Brazos and Colorado Railway extended its tracks into the
town. By 1859 the town was a prosperous shipping and market
center for the area's cotton plantations and had grown to
include a cotton warehouse and two hotels; a brick building
for other stores was also being built.
Though a number of men from Richmond and the surrounding
area joined Confederate companies during the Civil War and
the local economy declined, in other ways the town itself
remained largely isolated from the conflict. After the end
of the war, many emancipated slaves from surrounding
plantations began to move into Richmond's environs; in 1866
an agency of the federal Freedmen's Bureau was established
at Richmond, and in 1867 a company of federal troops were
stationed there. Allied with white Republicans, the area's
blacks controlled local politics until 1889, when whites in
the area seized control after the Jaybird-Woodpecker War.
Before the Civil War Richmond became a center of the
"cattle empire" that grew between the Brazos and Colorado
rivers; cattle were branded on ranges just west of the town
before being sent north to market centers in the Midwest. In
1878 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway extended its
tracks through the area but bypassed Richmond; a new, rival
community called Rosenberg was built on the railway three
miles from the old town. In 1884 2,000 people lived in
Richmond. That year, along with the courthouse and four
churches, the town had a bank, sugar mills and refineries,
and six schools. Cotton, corn, livestock, hides, sugar, and
molasses were being shipped from the town. A wooden bridge
across the Brazos was built at Richmond about 1888, and when
that collapsed five years later it was replaced by a
sturdier steel structure. Nevertheless, partly because of
competition from Rosenberg and other new towns growing in
the county at that time, Richmond's population dropped to
1,500 by 1890 and 1,180 by 1904. An enormous flood
surrounded the town in 1899. Richmond's economy remained
dependent on agriculture until the 1920s, when oil
production began in the county. By 1934 there were eight
producing oilfields and a sulfur mine within an eight-mile
radius of the town. During the 1930s sidewalks were extended
through much of the town, and a large municipal pool was
built; Richmond's citizens also approved a bond package that
funded a number of other civic improvements, including a new
city hall, a modern water system, and new fire-fighting
equipment. Though local agricultural production suffered
during the Great Depression, the surrounding cotton growers
still supported two large cotton gins in Richmond, and the
town also had a large irrigation pumping plant that supplied
water to rice fields in the area. Despite the improvements,
a traveler passing through the town in the 1930s still
thought Richmond's "fine old white frame residences of the
plantation type" gave the town "the air of the Deep South."
The town's population rose from 1,273 in 1920 to 1,432 by
1930, and to 2,026 by 1940. Beginning in the late 1940s
people began moving to the Richmond-Rosenberg area to
commute to jobs in Houston, and the trend intensified during
and after the 1950s. As a result the town's population grew
rapidly, rising from 2,026 in 1950 to 3,668 by 1960, to
5,777 by 1970, and to 9,692 by 1980. As Richmond and
Rosenberg grew together the towns increasingly cooperated in
development and planning projects. By 1990 there were 9,801
people living in Richmond. Historic points of interest in
Richmond include the Morton Cemetery, the 1883 John Moore
Home, the Long-Smith Cottage, the McFarlane Visitors Center,
the historic county courthouse, many historic homes, a
Confederate Museum, and the Fort Bend Historical Museum.