DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, there are stories that sneak up on you — and the story of rice in Colorado County is exactly that kind of story. One man, one experiment, forty acres, and then — well, hold on.
We'll get there. The marker stands in Colorado County, and it reaches all the way back to the very end of the nineteenth century, when rice had not yet made a single footprint on the coastal plains west of Houston. Not one grain.
The whole region was cotton and sugar cane country, and folks out here had no particular reason to think that was ever going to change. Then came Captain William Dunovant. Born in 1845, died in 1902 — so understand, this man did not have a lot of runway.
But what he did with the time he had is something else entirely. Dunovant was a local plantation owner and entrepreneur, and in 1898 he planted forty acres of rice at the southeast corner of Eagle Lake — about two and a half miles south of where you might be standing right now. He called it an experiment.
Convict labor from a nearby prison farm was used to construct the levees and bring in the harvest. Forty acres. An experiment.
The kind of thing most people would wait on before getting too excited. Well. The results were encouraging enough that Dunovant didn't wait long at all.
In 1899, he built a pumping plant right there on the lake and irrigated somewhere between two hundred fifty and three hundred acres. The second venture proved so successful that by 1900 — one year later — over thirty thousand acres of rice were under cultivation in the Colorado River Valley. And by 1901, that number had climbed past fifty-six thousand acres, mostly right here in Colorado County.
Cotton and sugar cane, the crops that had defined this land for generations, stepped aside. Rice became the primary cash crop, and it did not come quietly. Property values rose.
New families moved in. Abandoned croplands came back to life. Railroads got built.
Rice mills, irrigation companies, canal companies — a whole world of allied industries stood up to meet the moment. All of that, tracing its roots back to one man's forty-acre gamble on a lake in 1898. Captain Dunovant didn't live to see much of what he'd set in motion — 1902 came for him before it was fully grown.
But rice and the culture it supports, as the marker says, continue to be a major economic factor in Colorado County to this day. Some experiments turn out to be revolutions. This was one of them.
What the marker says
The rice industry did not spread into the coastal plains region west of Houston until the very end of the 19th century. In 1898, Captain William Dunovant (1845-1902), a local plantation owner and entrepreneur, planted 40 acres of rice at the southeast corner of Eagle Lake (2.5 miles south) as an experiment, using convict labor from a nearby prison farm to construct levees and harvest the new crop. The small tract produced such encouraging results that in 1899 Dunovant built a pumping plant on the lake and irrigated 250-300 acres. The second venture proved so successful that over 30,000 acres of rice were under cultivation in the Colorado River Valley in 1900, and over 56,000 acres in 1901, mostly in Colorado County. Rice quickly replaced cotton and sugar cane as the primary cash crop in Colorado County. That the crop had a widespread economic impact was reflected in the increase in property values, the influx of new families, the reclamation of abandoned croplands, the rise in new railroad construction, and the rapid development of allied service industries, such as rice mills and irrigation and canal companies. Rice and the culture it supports continue to be a major economic factor in Colorado County.