A Chautauqua Talk with Sugar Land Mayor Bill Little

---

THE MAKING OF FORT BEND
By Jonathan Fausset –

Recently, I had the opportunity to edit a video of one of the Chautauqua Talks, a historical speaker series hosted by the Sugar Land Heritage Foundation and the Sugar Land Cultural Arts Foundation. The series focuses on the history of Sugar Land, and this segment was with the second mayor of Sugar Land, Bill Little. Little was instrumental into developing Sugar Land into an incorporated city by helping it emerge from a company town. Little spoke with great fondness and easily found good humor in the history of Sugar Land. Below is a synopsis of the Chautauqua Talk featuring Little.

Bill Little was raised in Sandusky, Ohio and was invited as a young man by his uncle to take a look at Galveston as a place to settle down. Intrigued with the area, Little began working in the accounting department with Sugar Land Industries in February of 1957. He became mayor in 1961 and served two terms after serving one term as one of the first city council members of Sugar Land under Mayor T. E. Harman. At that time, the positions of city council members were known as aldermen. It wasn’t until 1981, when a special city election was held, that the city’s government was changed to a mayor-council government, which is what the city has today.

There were drastic differences between being a company-owned town and becoming an incorporated city in 1959. One of the most interesting changes was simply the trash pick up before and after Sugar Land’s incorporation. As a company town, owned and run by Sugar Land Industries, the garage man came six days a week. He would come inside residents’ houses, take the trash out of the pails and would even pick up any kitchen scraps that were in the sink, bag them up and take them out to the truck. There was no effort in taking trash out to the curb twice a week, the way we do today.

Something else the new town needed was a building inspector for all commercial and residential structures. The City of Sugar Land researched and adopted the Southern Standard Building code. Part of that code was to employ a civil engineer as a building inspector. In 1961, Hurricane Carla hit the Texas coast, and some of the speculative homes along Highway 90A lost their roofs. This prompted the city to insure that the homes built within city limits were solid and safe structures that would stand through all kinds of weather.

In the early days of Sugar Land, there was a fire department comprised of men who volunteered from Imperial Sugar and others from Sugar Land Industries. The phone would ring to notify firemen of a fire in two places. One was the fire station, and the other was in the power plant next to the factory, where workers would blow a whistle a certain way that signaled what neighborhood the fire was in. This rudimentary communication told the volunteers where to go. This was later replaced by a telephone system that was exclusive to the firemen. The telephone rang differently and relayed an address to the fire. This changed when the city began staffing the fire departments and quartering staff at fire stations.

Little’s remarks shared only a few of the examples of how Sugar Land has changed from where it began as a company-owned town. It was quite a venture taking a town out from under a company to stand on its own, and without the work and dedication of a select few, Sugar Land would not be at the heart of one of fastest growing  counties in America.