Brookshire: Where the Rice Fields Begin

Brookshire sits in Waller County at the edge of the coastal prairie, roughly thirty miles west of Houston, and its roots go back to eighteen thirty-five, when Captain Nathan Brookshire received a land grant here, and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad later made it a farming center. The town was named for Brookshire, a veteran of the Texian army.

By the early nineteen hundreds Brookshire was at the heart of the emerging Texas rice belt. The heavy Gulf Coast clay soil, flat terrain, and proximity to railroad cars made it ideal for irrigated rice cultivation that spread across Waller and Fort Bend counties. Today Brookshire is better known as a bedroom community for Houston, but the flat irrigated fields still visible south of the interstate are a direct inheritance from that early agricultural identity.