EAGLE LAKE — The Eagle Lake Noon Lions Club welcomed historian Dr. Sandra Thomas and Eagle Lake Rod and Gun Club General Manager Jerry Sims, General Manager of Eagle as its guest speakers at their Oct. 5 meeting.
Sims spoke briefly about the handsome decoy ducks he creates and Thomas related this interesting history of “Eagle Lake: Sugar City” The sugar industry which, began in Texas before the Civil War (1861-65), was revived in the late 1880s in the Colorado River basin near Eagle Lake. Sugarcane required an enormous amount of manual labor to cut and load the cane into wagons.
Since the local population could not meet the demand for workers, the plantation owners leased convicts from the Texas penitentiary system.
In 1898 about 700 prisoners were harvesting sugarcane in the area. One of the leading sugar producers in Colorado County was William Dunovant.
In 1898, he and several men from Eagle Lake built the Cane Belt Railroad to take cane to the mill.
The success of the railroad encouraged Dunovant to build a refining plant for this area. Lakeside Sugar Refinery, erected near Eagle Lake in about 1902, processed up to 1,000 tons of cane daily and produced 5,000,000 pounds of refined sugar yearly.
A train called the 'Whangdoodle' carried cane from nearby fields to the refinery. By 1907, Lakeside Mill was one of the largest in Texas, with about 100 employees. Eagle Lake was then known as “Sugar City”.
The booming Sugar Industry stimulated the local economy and attracted other able businessmen. However, several events caused the downfall of the local sugarcane business.
In 1910, the Texas legislature passed a law forbidding the leasing of convicts on humanitarian grounds.
Weather was also an enemy. In 1910-11, there was both a hurricane and a hard freeze, destroying more than half of the sugarcane crop.
The Lakeside Sugarcane Refinery closed in 1911 and by 1918 its machinery was dismantled and sold to a sugar producer in Jamaica where it is still in use today.
