W. T. Eldridge and the Kempner family promoted Sugar Land heavily in the 1920s. They were building up the community to attract families and a permanent workforce to their new company town. T. C. Rozelle saved a full-page article that appeared in the Galveston Tribune in March of 1925. I've clipped just a few items from it and posted them here.
It's hard to make out the handwritten date, but I think it's March 21, 1925. The Char House doesn't appear in the photo, so this guess seems reasonable.
As I said, they wanted to attract families and a permanent, stable workforce. The sugar business was seasonal and depended on transient labor for many years. Kempner and Eldridge wanted to run the refinery year round with multiple shifts, so they needed a permanent workforce. They thought a model community would attract the kind of people they wanted.
They saw the town's schools as a core element of their ideal community.
This next short clipping explains the sugar mill and the refinery operations. They closed the mill around 1928, when sugar was no longer grown locally. All of the refinery's raw sugar was imported. From 1928 onward, Imperial Sugar was a sugar refiner only. The clipping goes on to list some of the other industries in town. Eldridge and the Kempners were always interested in other money-making endeavors.
