A True Texas Business: The Imperial Sugar Company (July 9, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
Forbes Magazine, regularly in more than the last decade, has named Texas one of the “best places to start a business. Such ratings and lists are certainly arbitrary, and statistics are often manipulated after they are compiled to prove anything their interpreter wishes. But, I think that we at least agree that Texas has a fairly healthy commercial sector, and that a number of very prominent businesses call Texas home. If I asked you what the oldest still-operating business in Texas was, what would you answer? Would it surprise you to learn that it is the Imperial Sugar Company of Sugar Land, TX? I know it did me when I first heard it.
The origins of the Imperial Sugar Company began when Nathaniel Williams established the Oakdale Plantation just southwest of Houston in 1843. Oakdale was a self-sufficient and diversified operation, but sugar cane quickly became its most profitable crop. Two new owners, Benjamin Terry and William Kyle, using enslaved people as their labor force, further intensified sugar cane cultivation when they bought the plantation in the 1850s, firmly grounding the area as the top sugar producing region in Texas. The important point is that the owners did more than grow sugar; again using slaves, they began to refine sugar cane on the plantation into processed sugar and molasses, which they sold to surrounding planters and farmers. A business was born.
Eventually, after the Civil War and the end of slavery, E.H. Cunningham acquired Oakdale, and he built a much larger sugar refinery on the plot in 1879, where he began a prosperous operation almost singularly focused on refined, processed sugar—the little granules that some of us (my doctor won’t let me use it anymore) use to make the little delights that we love to eat. Adjacent to Cunningham’s holdings was the Ellis Plantation, owned and operated by the prominent Kempner family of Galveston, in a partnership with William Eldridge. The Kempner’s, constantly looking to increase their holdings and business empire cast their gaze on the Cunningham sugar refinery in the early 1900s. The Kempner-Eldridge concern bought Cunningham’s entire land holding in 1908, and included in the transaction was the refinery. The Kempner’s operated a raw sugar mill on their land that they called the “Imperial Mill.” When they acquired the refinery, they named the entire operation the Imperial Sugar Company. The Kempner family tapped Dan Kempner as president of the new sugar company, and William Eldridge moved to the area around the refinery to become the general manager and also to build a “company town,” which he named Sugar Land.
The new operation boomed and expanded as the Kempners and Eldridge promoted and supported their new venture. They recruited mostly German descent Texans from central Texas to move to their new town, and also established various businesses such as a bank, a mercantile firm, a feed mill, and a modern, state-of-the art cotton gin. They even built a brand-new plant for a small mattress company named Sealy, all in an effort to attract more industry to the site.
The primary business also did not remain stagnant. The Imperial Sugar Company significantly expanded their operations, becoming a key player in the burgeoning American national sugar industry. In addition to producing refined sugar products, the Kempner-Eldridge operations expanded into trucking, warehousing, real estate, cattle, and operated a very successful motor company. It quickly became one of the most valuable companies in the state, even rivaling in assets some of the booming oil companies established after the Spindletop gusher.
The American sugar industry had been built on the backs of first enslaved workers and then protective tariffs; large duties on imported sugar from the Caribbean and Pacific islands kept the domestic trade dominant, but such barriers began to disappear in the late 1890s and early 1900s as the U.S. government began to dismantle the old ideas of protectionism in an effort to foster competition and eliminate monopolies, and also to rid the nation of the corruption that far too-often often accompanied such arrangements. As the duties opened up imports, domestic farmers turned to other more profitable crops, and sugar growers in Texas began to disappear. By the 1930s, the Imperial Company was the only Texas sugar manufacturer left—and they were just barely operating. Then came the Great Depression, which came very close to bankrupting the Imperial Sugar Company. However, with the help of a federal government sponsored loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the company not only survived it began to expand.
World War II ushered in another boom. Under rationing agreements, Imperial provided all the sugar for Texas and Oklahoma and even after the war, due to the magic of brand recognition, Imperial continued to almost wholly dominate those markets. The Kempners took sole control of the company and the town in 1946, and it grew to even greater heights when it began to import raw sugar from throughout the world. Eventually, in 1989, Imperial merged with the Holly Sugar Corporation to create one of the largest sugar refiners on the world, one that processed not only sugar cane but beet sugar as well.
Sugar Land is no longer a “company town;” it is now a growing suburb of Houston filled with housing developments, chain restaurants, and “big box’ retailers. But the Imperial Sugar Company is still there. So when someone tells you that Texas is becoming a good place to start a business, you can just reply that has been the case for quite some time. And, I guess, you can have my share of sugar, too.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.