The first event that shaped Simonton’s history was when James Simonton and his brother Theophilus bought 4000 acres of land in Northwest Fort Bend County in the 1840s. The two Simonton brothers built a plantation next to the Brazos River. They raised cotton. The year 1850 is officially designated as the founding year for the Simonton since the 1850 US Census showed the two brothers, their mother, Mary, and Theophilus’s wife and two sons residing on the property. Another brother, Joseph, and his family moved to the plantation in the 1850s. In 1857, Theophilus helped charter the Richmond Masonic Hall Association, symbolizing the elite status of the SImonton family in Fort Bend County. The town of Simonton joined Fulshear and Pittsville as the main rural towns in Northwest Fort Bend County.
At the onset of the US Civil War, the 1860 US Census shows that the Simonton’s owned one of the largest and most prosperous plantations in Fort Bend County with a real property value at $200,000 and personal property valued at $155,000. The Simonton brothers have been identified as among the largest slaveholders in Texas. According to the 1860 US census and a subsequent research, there were 105 slaves on the Simonton plantation on the eve of the Civil War. This census also revealed that their plantation had 975 improved acres that produced 11,000 bushels of corn and 600 bales of cotton. Like many Texas plantation owners, they supported the Confederacy.
The plantation was broken up and sold after the war. Tracts of land were sold to incoming settlers. The Simonton’s actively resisted the post-Civil War Reconstruction efforts. During the Fort Bend Jaybird-Woodpecker political battles during post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Simonton brothers joined the Jaybirds, a faction within the Democratic Party, who wanted to oust the Woodpeckers, primarily blacks and their white allies, from the county administration. In October 1888 in nearby Pittsville, Theophilus Simonton Jr. was arrested by the county sheriff for fatally shooting a local black leader, Lamar Johnson, and injuring his half-brother, Taylor Randonan. This incident gained regional and national attention on the deep racial divisions of the Jaybird-Woodpecker War raging throughout Fort Bend County.
The Simonton family’s position and presence gradually dwindled after the deaths of the pioneer brothers and the influx of European immigrants who passed through Galveston during the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Their deaths accompanied by the industrial revolution that was sweeping the United States drastically altered the economic means, and thus the social and political roles, in Simonton as well as throughout Fort Bend Country.
According to oral history documentation, the Ku Klux Klan was present in Simonton from the early 20th Century, as they were in many Texas small towns, and were especially active due to the influx of foreign-born immigrants, who moved to Simonton to worked as farm and ranch help for the local cattle ranches and pecan groves.
The next event shaping Simonton history was the advent, around 1888, of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad. It’s said the company wanted the track to run through Pittsville (near what is now Fulshear) where the terrain was more level. However, the landowners in that area refused to sell the railroad a right-of-way because they believed the trains would scare their cattle. So the line was laid across the hills and creeks between Fulshear and Simonton. Water was as necessary as coal for the steam-powered locomotives, and Simonton became one of the main watering stops. With the tracks, came the people. With the tracks also came the opportunity to ship the area’s farm produce to other parts of the country.
In subsequent years, Simonton developed into a robust agricultural community. Snap shots of this historical has been noted in several oral historical accounts:
Gradually by 1957, Simonton had changed from a busy small town to a quiet crossroads community. Then came the beginnings of a new stage in the life of the town. Vernon Evans, owner of the nearby Rue Ranch, and his son-in-law, A.E. “Snake” Bailey, bought 850 acres of land along FM 1093 to be developed as a western community with stables and a small arena and club house, the hub around which houses would be built. The development was called Valley Lodge. Valley Lodge subdivision was the first subdivision out of the city of Houston within commuting distance.
In the months following the Sino-US normalization, China’s Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping visited the United States for nine days in 1979, visiting Washington, Atlanta, Houston and Seattle. On February 2 during his visit to Houston, he spent an evening in Simonton at the Roundup Rodeo. In 1963 the Round Up was built on FM 1093. Also the brainchild of “Snake” Bailey, it is a large indoor rodeo arena in full swing every Saturday night, drawing people from Houston and elsewhere for a taste of the “real west.” He rode in a stagecoach, and later a barrel racer gave the premier a cowboy-style duster and a ten-gallon hat, both of which he donned and displayed before the crowd.
Deng’s visit to the Simonton rodeo is considered to be the tipping point in the thaw of US-China relations.
The Simonton Rodeo closed by 1997 when it was bought and restored by Benchmark Wireline, an oil services company. A China Daily Global video captures the memories of this visit, including Katie Van Dries whose father Luke owned the rodeo at that time.
The photographs of Deng in the cowboy hat appeared in American newspapers, displaying a distinctly human side to a previously mysterious Chinese leader. As Ezra F. Vogel, a biographer of Deng, put it, the
In 1979, the community incorporated as the City of Simonton. The population grew to 603 in 1980 and 718 in 2000. In 2010 the population was 814.
