In February 2018, a construction excavator in Sugar Land, Texas, unearthed a human bone at the site of a new career and technical school. By summer, archaeologists had recovered 95 bodies from beneath the building site. All were African American, buried between 1878 and 1911. They were not slaves—emancipation had come decades earlier.
They were prisoners of the state of Texas, leased to private companies, forced to work in sugarcane fields until they dropped. The fields where they died later became a suburb. The sugar company that grew from their labor became a national brand, still sold today. Sugar Land is now one of the most desirable places to live in the United States, with roughly 80,000 residents, careful planning, and top-rated schools.
But its story begins with a loophole in the U. S. Constitution. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, banned slavery and involuntary servitude—except as punishment for a crime.
After the Civil War, Texas had nearly 250,000 freed Black people and an agricultural economy built on cotton and sugarcane. Sugarcane work was brutal: 18-to-20-hour days cutting stalks up to ten feet tall, hauling them to mills that had to run continuously through the harvest. Before emancipation, enslavers had a financial interest in keeping enslaved workers alive because they were capital. After 1865, that incentive vanished.
In 1871, Texas legalized leasing its entire prison system to private operators. The first contractor paid the state a fixed annual fee and took full responsibility for feeding, clothing, guarding, and working every inmate. For the lessee, revenue came from labor; costs came from keeping prisoners alive. Every dollar spent on food or medicine reduced profit.
Death meant no financial loss—only a replaceable unit. In 1878, two former Confederate officers, Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis, leased every inmate in the Texas prison system and put them to work on their adjacent sugarcane plantations on the Brazos River in Fort Bend County. The town that grew around the sugar mill was named Sugar Land. The oldest of the 95 bodies found in 2018 was buried in 1878—the first year of their contract.
Most prisoners were convicted under laws that criminalized minor offenses: vagrancy, leaving a work contract, or stealing property worth only a few dollars. A Black man could be arrested simply for standing on a road without proof of employment, convicted in minutes without a lawyer, and sentenced to years of hard labor. Newspapers called the Fort Bend County camps “Hell on the Brazos. ” The documented death rate was about three percent a year—worse than slavery itself.
Inmates slept in crowded, windowless barracks, were fed cornbread and pork fat, and worked through the night during harvest. Discipline was enforced with a leather whip called “the bat. ” Official inspectors were supposed to oversee the camps, but investigators later found inspectors had signed blank authorization forms for beatings and left them with camp officers. The Texas legislature refused to renew the statewide lease in 1883, but the system did not end.
The state bought plantations and operated them directly. In 1909, the state opened the Imperial State Prison Farm on land purchased in Sugar Land. Inmates were still buried in the unmarked field until 1911. A Methodist pastor, Jake Hodges, gathered testimony and passed it to reporter George Waverley Briggs.
In 1909, Briggs published a documented account of conditions. The legislature’s own investigation confirmed the abuses: men beaten bloody, prisoners wearing the same underwear for weeks, rampant lice and bedbugs, and medical records almost nonexistent. Governor Thomas Campbell called Briggs a “cub reporter,” but in 1910 the legislature abolished convict leasing and created a board of prison commissioners. Private leasing contracts were phased out by 1914.
But the burials did not stop at the stroke of a law. The 95 bodies recovered in 2018 were buried from 1878 to 1911, meaning men were still being interred in unmarked graves after Texas was supposed to have reformed the system. The skeletons told a precise physical story: massive muscles built by years of brutal labor; signs of chronic starvation; twisted healed fractures that were never set; arthritis in men in their twenties; and gunshot wounds. One body was a 14-year-old.
One was a woman. The anthropologists described men forced to do animal-level work on a diet that could not sustain them. Reginald Moore was a Houston dockworker who had briefly worked as a corrections officer at a state prison farm outside Sugar Land. For decades, he studied county records, old ledgers, the 1909 legislative report, and calculated what officials ignored: if thousands of convicts worked those camps, and three percent died each year, there had to be graves.
For twenty years, he warned the city, the county, and the school district in writing that unmarked burials lay beneath the proposed building site. He asked for a survey. Officials dismissed him. He secured a state historical marker for the old Imperial Farm Cemetery in 2015, and Rice University acquired his research archive.
But no survey was approved. Construction continued. On February 19, 2018, the school district’s superintendent called Moore to tell him a construction crew had found human remains at the career and technical center site. In June 2018, a court granted permission to exhume the bodies.
The school district and the city moved to rebury the remains at the old Imperial Farm Cemetery, but the community objected, arguing that moving them would erase the historical evidence a second time. In October 2018, a task force voted 19–1 to keep the remains on-site and create a memorial. In August 2019, the district withdrew a $1 million donation it had committed for a memorial, and a judge appointed an attorney to represent the interests of the unknown dead. The district fought that appointment and won.
In September 2019, the district contracted a funeral home for reburial. On November 27, 2019, the remains of the 95 were reburied. Moore described the day as an attempt to erase the painful history of the site. He died in July 2020, at age 60, from heart complications.
He never saw a memorial, a plaque, or a list of names. Researchers have since worked to identify the dead. By August 2020, they had preliminarily identified 72 names out of 95 from documentary evidence. Genetic genealogy has been used to trace descendants.
Scholars have suggested the true number of convicts buried in the area may be closer to 300—only those within the school’s construction boundary were recovered. The Imperial State Prison Farm operated for 112 years under various names, eventually becoming the Central Unit, a medium-security prison. In August 2011, Texas closed it due to budget constraints. The land was developed into the Telfair subdivision.
The school district built its career and technical center on a portion of the old prison land. There was no museum, no monument, no sign—the erasure was complete. In June 2025, on Juneteenth, the “Sugar Land 95” received a historical marker. In December 2025, Fort Bend County approved a $1.
5 million plan for a proper monument. As of 2026, a memorial is planned, and funding was finally allocated. The name “Imperial” still appears on bags of sugar sold in American grocery stores. The company’s name derives from the prison farm.
The ground beneath the school held bodies for 140 years—at least 95 of them, perhaps 300, including one who was 14. Reginald Moore spent two decades telling officials where the bodies were, with documents. He was ignored until the evidence was undeniable, and died before the memorial was approved.
Some 72 names have been recovered; 23 remain unknown.