Fulshear

Fulshear, at the junction of Farm roads 359 and 1093, in northern Fort Bend County, developed around the plantation of Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's original Old Three Hundred. The small agricultural community centered around the Fulshears' cotton gin and flour mill until 1888, when Churchill Fulshear, Jr., granted the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway a right-of-way through his land there. Many families moved to the developing community from nearby Pittsville, which had refused the railroad, and in 1890 the town of Fulshear was laid out and granted a post office. Though there is evidence that there was a schoolhouse at a chapel meeting ground on the Fulshear Plantation in 1855, it was not until 1893 that the Fulshear school district was established. A Methodist church was organized at the community in 1894 and still existed in 1988. By 1898 a population of 250 supported eleven stores, three saloons, a school, and a hotel. The town recovered quickly from a fire in 1910 that destroyed a block of businesses; within two years downtown Fulshear was so busy that on paydays residents complained that the sidewalks were too crowded to walk on. The town reported 300 residents and ten stores in 1929. Its population fell to 100 in 1933, around the time that the Fulshear plantation house was torn down, and remained below 250 until the spread of the Houston metropolitan area in the late 1970s. The Fulshear schools-two for Black students, one for Hispanics, and one for Whites-were merged into the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in 1948. The Huggins Elementary School was built in Fulshear in 1979. Fulshear was incorporated in the early 1980s and remained a marketing center for locally produced rice, cotton, soybeans, corn, poultry, and cattle. Pecans were also an important local crop. In 1988 Fulshear had a population of 623 and twelve businesses; in 1990 its population was 557. In 2000 Fulshear had a population of 716 and sixty-nine businesses.