Map Showing Where Oyster Creek in Sienna Plantation Texas Drains
A large brick building called a "purgery" in Sienna Plantation, an enormous master-planned community, reportedly dates to before the Civil War and was involved in the sugar-making process, which depended on slave labor. It was photographed on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A sugar cane mill and three large bowls are photographed at a history park in Sienna Plantation on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City. According to a sign at the park, the mill, a "Kentucky #2" 725 pound mill, was produced between 1888-1905, and it was powered by two mules turning in a circle. This type of mill would have been used to crush sugar cane grown in the region in the mid 1800s.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A bust of Larry Johnson is photographed at a history park in Sienna Plantation on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City. According to signs at the park, the land that became Sienna Plantation was originally part of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony. By 1860, the area became the Waters Plantation, named for Jonathan D. Waters, slave labor was used to produce sugar, cotton and other crops. Waters at one point became the wealthiest man in Fort Bend County and one of the largest slave owners. From 1875-1911, the plantation, under different ownership, depended on leased convict labor, former slaves and wage workers.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A bust of Larry Johnson is photographed at a history park in Sienna Plantation on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City. According to signs at the park, the land that became Sienna Plantation was originally part of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony. By 1860, the area became the Waters Plantation, named for Jonathan D. Waters, slave labor was used to produce sugar, cotton and other crops. Waters at one point became the wealthiest man in Fort Bend County and one of the largest slave owners. From 1875-1911, the plantation, under different ownership, depended on leased convict labor, former slaves and wage workers.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
The sun sets over Oyster Creek, in the Sienna Plantation community, on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A large brick building called a "purgery" in Sienna Plantation, an enormous master-planned community, reportedly dates to before the Civil War and was involved in the sugar-making process, which depended on slave labor. It was photographed on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A history park in Sienna Plantation, photographed on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City. According to signs at the park, the land that became Sienna Plantation was originally part of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony. By 1860, the area became the Waters Plantation, named for Jonathan D. Waters, and it used slave labor to produce sugar, cotton and other crops. Waters at one point became the wealthiest man in Fort Bend County and one of the largest slave owners. From 1875-1911, the plantation, under different ownership, depended on the convict-leasing system, former slaves and wage workers for labor.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
The sun sets over the Sienna Plantation community on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
A sugar cane mill and three large bowls are photographed at a history park in Sienna Plantation on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City. According to a sign at the park, the mill, a "Kentucky #2" 725 pound mill, was produced between 1888-1905, and it was powered by two mules turning in a circle. This type of mill would have been used to crush sugar cane grown in the region in the mid 1800s.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
Signs advertising homes in the Sienna Plantation community, photographed on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Missouri City.
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographerJoanne Ryan, a Louisiana-based archaeologist, specializes in excavating plantation sites where slaves cooked sugar. Before the Civil War, it's estimated that roughly 1,500 "sugarhouses" operated in the U.S., but development, hurricanes and time have wiped away almost all of them. Ryan normally contents herself with digging the buildings' foundations.
But about two years ago, a coworker surfing the internet came across photos of a brick building in Fort Bend County. The website identified it as "the sugar barn." But Ryan recognized it as something exceedingly rare: an antebellum sugar purgery, a super-strong building with a specialized floor.
Experts had thought that no such building still existed in the U.S. It's a thing of national historic significance, a remnant of slavery's most brutal crop — and a building that Ryan desperately wants to examine and document.
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But earlier this month, the site's owner — Sienna, the master-planned subdivision that was, until recently known as Sienna Plantation — refused to let her and a team even visit the site for a few hours.
Now, history buffs and archaeologists are worried that this last-of-its-kind building could be wrecked before it has even been properly examined. Sienna is growing fast, and big houses are rapidly encroaching on the site.
"With this exposure," Ryan and two members of the Fort Bend County Historical Commission wrote in their proposal, "the risk of damage or destruction through neglect, vandalism and fire is high."
'Potentially historic items'
Alvin San Miguel, the vice president and general manager of Sienna by Johnson Development Corp., emailed a statement to the Houston Chronicle explaining the decision. A previous archaeology team, he wrote, had already provided photographs of "certain potentially historic items."
"It is the intent of the owners to maintain the items in their current conditions," he wrote, "until such time that another entity would take responsibility for those items."
A professional archaeologist had previously photographed the site. In 1984 — long before the building was identified as a purgery — Wayne Glander of Espey, Hustin & Associated issued a report on the site. The archaeological firm recommended rehabilitating the building and the remains nearby to "enhance the extremely limited surviving data of the early sugar industry" and to make sure that the surviving structures "not be lost to history."
The remains of sugar plantations have special historic significance, notes James Sidbury, a Rice professor who studies the history of race and slavery.
"There just weren't as many of those," Sidbury said. "So blocking the ability to look at those things is a bigger blow to what we know about slavery in the U.S. than if it were a cotton plantation or a tobacco plantation."
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Most valuable and most brutal
The plantation where Sienna now stands wasn't called "Sienna Plantation." It was called Arcola. And it was both one of the most valuable and most brutal plantations in Texas.
Its owner, Jonathan Dawson Waters, left Alabama for the Republic of Texas in 1840, and began amassing the land where he'd eventually grow cotton and sugarcane. By 1860, Arcola was one of the largest plantations in Texas, and Waters was the richest person in Fort Bend County. According to the 1860 Census, he owned 216 slaves, which made him the third-largest slaveowner in Texas.
He could do much as he pleased. According to the Texas State Historical Association, in 1847, after a property dispute with a white neighbor, he and a group of friends went to the man's house, where Waters shot the unarmed man in front of his wife. There's no record that he was tried for the murder.
Historian Michael Tadman has shown that slaves on sugar plantations had a lower life expectancy than slaves on other kinds of plantations. Heavy work and inadequate food meant that sugar-plantations slaves were, "compared with other working-age slaves in the United States, far less able to resist the common and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty," he wrote.
But even in the area known as the "Texas Sugar Bowl," Waters was known as a harsh slavemaster. According to the Texas State Historical Association, he "had a reputation for overworking his slaves and of feeding them nothing but cornmeal mush."
Hardest of all was sugarcane harvest season, October through Christmas. After the cane was cut, it had to be crushed right away. During harvest, Waters' sugar operation operated 24 hours a day.
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Up to the landowner
The building that remains, the "purgery," looks like an enormous barn. Arcola slaves made its bricks, and most likely its enormous timber supports came from trees felled on the plantation.
Ryan's archaeological interest lies chiefly in the details of the building's construction, the sugar-making process and its technology. Of particular interest to her is the exact nature of the building's floor. The cane's juice would be boiled down to a grainy molasses-y goop, then put in 1,200-pound barrels with holes in their bottoms. While stored in the purgery, the molasses would drain away through the holes, and into special cisterns underneath the floor, leaving the far more valuable sugar grains in the barrels. The whiter and more molasses-free the sugar, the higher its price.
Ryan discovered the Arcola site via photos labeled "brick barn of Arcola" on LifeOnTheBrazosRiver.com, a history website run by John Walker. Walker and other history buffs used to maintain the site as volunteers, when previous subdivision owners allowed them access. They're the ones who put the current metal roof on the building, and who discovered the giant bowls, once used to boil sugar, that are now displayed at Sienna History Park.
Walker laments that over the years, items he photographed — such as a metal plaque identifying the maker of the sugar mill's steam engine — have disappeared from the mill's site, apparently stolen by vandals.
Sienna, though, is under no obligation to preserve or document the site.
"If it's entirely a private concern — if it's not on federal or state land, or using federal funds, or something like that — it's up to the landowner," explained Texas state archaeologist Pat Mercado-Allinger. "It's not the jurisdiction of the Texas Historical Commission to impose anything on a private landowner unless a site is designated as a state antiquities landmark."
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Map Showing Where Oyster Creek in Sienna Plantation Texas Drains
Source: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/fort-bend-last-sugarhouse-plantation-slavery-14556046.php
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