The Sugar Land Heritage Foundation would like to thank Johnson Development for providing SLHF with temporary headquarters on the Imperial Sugar refinery site in the Engineering and Personnel Building, which was located next to the iconic 1925 Char House. Johnson Development’s generosity allowed SLHF to renovate the space to create an office, a collections storage area, a cataloging workroom, and a small museum exhibit gallery, where we enlightened the public for more than eight years.
We would also like to thank the City of Sugar Land, Kempner Fund, Cherokee Investments, Imperial Sugar, the Fort Bend Museum Association, and community representatives for their generous support in making the SLHF Museum a reality.
The incentive for forming the SLHF was the shutdown of the refinery in 2003. The refinery site, which had been processing sugar since the mid-1800’s, contained a vast treasure trove of historical artifacts, documents, and photographs that traced the evolution of the site from its early days as a working plantation into its more modern era as a company town.
The Sugar Land Heritage Foundation was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization in March 2008, with the first Board meeting in October 2008.