I want to thank Bruce Grethen, one of my colleagues at the Fort Bend County Historical Commission, for showing the collection of high-resolution aerial photos in the US Geographical Survey archive. They are terrific.
Here's a low-res version of a December 1968 aerial to orient you before viewing the high-res version.
Click this link to view the high-res version. It is a very large file, so it may take considerable time to load. You get a superb view of where things stood in the southeast quadrant of Sugar Land at that time. [Note: I just tested the link, and Google Drive doesn't do a good job of showing the magnified image at its best. I'll see if there's a better method to store and display the image, but I'll leave this version here for now.] The USGS has aerials of all of Fort Bend County. I'll post more in the future.
I've wanted to post this next set of maps for a while, but the site had problems when I tested it. I think it's working well now; click here to view it. It's called Hidden Texas History and comes from the Texas Land Office. They have overlaid a modern state map over several historic maps. You move a 'key hole' viewer over the modern map to see the a selected historic map under it. (Once you try it, all will become clear.)
Of course, I was interested in the Austin Colony map which shows where the original leagues were located in terms of today's map.
