Forty Acres of Rice Changed Colorado County's Economy

Colorado County's rice boom began with 40 acres at the southeast corner of Eagle Lake. In 1898, plantation owner William Dunovant tried the crop there. Convict labor from a nearby prison farm built the levees and harvested the field, a hard part of the experiment's history that belongs in the story.

That crop did well enough for Dunovant to build a pumping plant in 1899. The plant drew lake water for 250 to 300 acres. By 1900, more than 30,000 acres of rice were growing in the Colorado River valley. The figure passed 56,000 acres in 1901, mainly in Colorado County. Rice quickly replaced cotton and sugar cane as the county's leading cash crop. The change raised property values, brought new families, returned abandoned cropland to production, and encouraged more railroad building. Rice mills, irrigation companies, and canal companies grew around the fields.

The THC marker stands at Main and Commerce streets in Eagle Lake, close to where the county can still read the sequence: one field, one pump, then an agricultural system. The lake supplied water, but the larger change spread by rail, canal, and mill.