By Leah Binkovitz
Associated Press
SUGAR LAND, Texas — The handful of headstones offer little information: a name, a date and a prison number. Some don’t even have that.
In one corner of the plot, Taylor L. Odom’s gravestone includes his prison number, 54714; his date of death, July 31, 1927; and the cause, drowned while attempting to escape.
Of the roughly 30 marked graves, this one catches Reginald Moore’s eye whenever he comes to the Old Imperial Farm Cemetery, where he serves as guardian, a volunteer position appointed by the Texas Historical Commission. Many of the men buried inside the fenced-in cemetery were likely prisoners forced to work the land. Their lives were part of a history when Sugar Land was the heart of a statewide convict leasing system that served as a sort of reincarnation of slavery after its demise.
For more than a decade, Moore has highlighted this history, including the convict leasing that allowed private companies to control and profit from convict labor. His efforts to memorialize not only the cemetery, but the history that he believes has yet to be fully uncovered, have not always been well-received.
Now the cemetery land is in a sort of limbo. The state sold off portions of the prison land over time. Today the city owns it. Sugar Land had hoped to develop the land around it into a park, but a 2013 bond proposal to do so failed. Moore and others are certain there’s more beneath the surface - more bodies, more artifacts. And should the city decide to develop the land, an issue it promises to revisit in the next year or two, it would be legally required to survey the land before development.
For now, Moore checks up on it, the Houston Chronicle has reported. He has a key that gets him past two sets of metal fences that enclose the cemetery. And the city has mowed the grass and maintained the property, having bought the land from Newland Communities in 2011. Working with the state historical commission, the city expects a marker to be placed at the site soon.
“Frankly,” city spokesman Doug Adolph acknowledged, “it’s taken longer than we anticipated.”
He says the city is committed to honoring the history there. He points to not only the continued cemetery maintenance but to the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Sugar Land, which was built inside what was once the Main Unit, known as Two Camp, where the prison’s black inmates were held.
“That was a significant investment from the city to make that happen,” Adolph said.
Moore is grateful that the city allows his group, the Texas Slave Descendants Society, to host events there. But he still would like to see a museum that honors the history of the men involved in the convict leasing system.
The same constitutional amendment that ended slavery also allowed forced labor to continue, if used as punishment. Many historians have argued that because so many of the men who were imprisoned, often on trumped-up charges, were African-American, and because some of the same plantations that had depended on slaves benefited from convict leasing contracts, the practice of convict leasing was in some ways an extension of slavery.
“These people were enslaved twice,” Moore said.
City officials said they’d be willing to consider a museum if Moore, a retired longshoreman, could come up with the funding. Adolph noted that Moore does not live in Sugar Land and added, “Sometimes it’s easier to spend other people’s money.”
Moore lives in Houston, a short drive from the cemetery. When he worked for a few years as a correctional officer in Richmond, he recalls driving daily through Sugar Land.
His time as an officer led him to the cemetery. And in many ways, the experience haunts him.
A product of Houston’s Third Ward and later Clayton Homes after his father was imprisoned, he says, “I had seen some things.” He thought working in the prison might give him a chance to help people.
“I thought that’s what it was - a place for rehabilitation,” he recalled.
That was not his experience. Though the prisoners had been integrated, he said he was one of only a few black employees when he was hired in 1985, almost the opposite of what he saw in the prison population. He said he watched as white officers on horseback surveyed fields of black prisoners picking cotton.
“It reminded me of an old oppressive plantation,” he said.
Indeed, the prisoners were laboring on the same lands where the area’s sugar plantations once were, just as convicts had in the years following slavery’s end.
“As early as the 1870s, convict labor was used to cultivate the land,” explained Chris Florance, director of public information and education for the Texas Historical Commission. Two sugar-cane plantation owners whose names are sprinkled over city landmarks today, Littleberry Ambrose Ellis and Edward H. Cunningham, leased convict labor from the state to work the land under the new post-emancipation arrangement. It was Ellis who built the Imperial Mill in 1883.
Conditions for working the land were so bad that Sugar Land earned the nickname, “Hell-hole on the Brazos.” Accounts describe prisoners laboring in wet fields of sugar cane, often succumbing to epidemics in the swampy, mosquito-laden landscape.
The state ended convict leasing after exposés on the inmates’ terrible treatment and pressure from people who thought the system should more directly benefit the state. But companies’ existing contracts were honored until they expired.
Around that time, the Imperial Sugar Co. bought the Ellis plantation, according to Florance, and then sold it to the state in 1908. With convict labor coming back under state control, the state established the Imperial State Prison Farm on the land where 400 convicts raised sugar cane, cotton and corn. It’s on those grounds, later called the Central State Prison Farm before being shut down in 2011, that the cemetery sits, many of the grave-markers bearing dates after the state disallowed companies from leasing convict labor.
Because Cunningham and Ellis were some of the first to successfully rely on convict leasing, Moore sees Sugar Land as central to a much bigger story about race in Texas - one he thinks many are hesitant to have told.
“Cunningham and Ellis were the first ones to make it extremely profitable,” said W. Caleb McDaniel, an associate professor of history at Rice University. “Nobody had really turned it into a big engine for economic gain until the Sugar Land experiment.” And that, he said, laid the groundwork for industrial sugar production by Imperial.
The Imperial plant was the epicenter of Sugar Land for nearly a century and a half, employing nearly all who lived there, and now is the site of a major redevelopment.
Sandra Rogers, the curator of collections at the Texas Prison Museum, thinks the cemetery should be left alone.
“Really there’s no point if there’s nothing getting built on top of this,” said Rogers, who helped the city prepare its application for the historical commission for the cemetery.
There are 16 prison cemeteries across the state, each protected like the Old Imperial Farm location. She said more archaeological work could just lead to more trouble, like people going out with shovels and metal detectors.
However, Moore would like to see more action both in researching and remembering. He has written and appealed to city and county officials, museums, colleges, the state historical commission and board of education.
“Reggie has an extremely good point and I don’t think anybody is listening,” said Kenneth Brown, a professor of anthropology with the University of Houston. When Moore approached him roughly a year and a half ago, Brown saw an opportunity to launch an applied archaeology program at the UH Sugar Land branch that could help do some of the work Moore was interested in. Brown even believed there might be neglected sites associated with the old prison farm on the campus itself. “I don’t think it was looked for well if it was looked for,” he said.
Moore knows there is more to discover. The cemetery, with only a few graves, is mostly white men. Because the prison system was segregated well into the 20th century, he suspects that the black inmates were buried elsewhere, perhaps not in a formal cemetery. If their bodies were found, the land couldn’t be developed until the city exhumed them and placed them in a perpetual care cemetery.
“That’s extremely expensive,” said Brown, “so one of the things that happens is that people don’t really look for them.”
But Moore is looking. Asking. His four years as a correctional officer motivate him as he looks at over the headstones of his little cemetery, wondering what else is beneath the surface.