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‘Figitis’ takes root in early Angleton
Published August 24, 2009
No one who lived in Angleton in the mid-1920s and early 1930s was unaware of the Angleton Fig Plant. It was the town’s only industry, and was something that touched every resident’s life in one way or another.
A front page story in the Angleton Times on Nov. 19, 1926, advised the community its fig orchards had brought growers almost $21,000 that year.
That might not sound like much today, but it was a whopping sum to increase the income of local farmers back in 1926.
“In spite of a desperately dry season that was not at all favorable to heavy fruitage,” the Times reported, the season had brought growers a total of $20,900.28 “from baby orchards.”
In addition, the plant had paid its workers a total of $11,000 during the “packing season.”
“This distribution of nearly $33,000 would not have been felt very much in a big city, or in a thickly populated community, but in a small town like Angleton, in a community where folks are somewhat scattering, believe me, it was a stimulant like a big meal and a cup of hot coffee to a hungry tramp,” the article stated, adding “This town felt it. Still feels it. Going to continue to feel it.”
This article was written just three years after Angletonians began to think about getting into the fig growing and packing business.
Mentioning a trip taken to Friendswood, where local visitors observed that community’s operation of the fig growing and processing business, the paper referred to it as a “notable pilgrimage” that exposed each of its visitors to an uncontrollable disease, “figitis.”
“Angleton got a good hard case,” the article continued. “We all came home and got busy. Just about three years ago today the first of the pioneer growers were figuring on just where to plant the orchard, and were hunting up a tractor or currying the mules. We were all in the primer class in fig growing.”
The Angleton area’s first trees were planted in March 1924 by local residents who “loosened up purse strings, or got on the dotted line at the bank, which amounts to about the same thing,” the Times editor crowed.
That story is indicative of the community spirit the Angleton Fig Plant stirred.
In his book, “Memories of Seventy-Eight Years in Brazoria County,” Frank K. Stevens remembered the impetus for the venture came a couple of years after the arrival in Angleton of E.L. “Jack” Boston, who moved here to head the Angleton State Bank.
“Mr. Boston was a dynamic young man and he and I became good friends and during the years have worked together for many things that we felt were helpful to the town of Angleton,” Stevens wrote.
Stevens remembered the trip to Friendswood, where the residents “had put in a canning plant and were doing a very good business growing Magnolia Figs and canning them or preserving them in a heavy syrup and packing in attractive fashion in glass jars.”
The idea already had been copied successfully by several other towns along the Texas Gulf Coast. Local farmers and other residents met with experienced participants from other areas, Stevens wrote, “and we came home all fired up to get started.”
He explained arrangements were made to include everyone who wanted to develop an orchard. Those involved began tilling the soil and laying out properly separated rows so they were ready for planting.
Because a canning plant was essential to the plan, the Angleton Fig Company was incorporated. Boston and Stevens were active in sale of the company’s stock, which was purchased primarily by local residents, though some shares were sold out of town.
Of the $60,000 worth of shares sold, Stevens recalled that Lewis Mims, head of the Freeport Sulphur Company, bought a block of the stock.
Mims was named as the corporation’s president, with other directors including Stevens; Boston; B.M. Jamison, president of the Brazoria County State Bank; and W.F. Reed, publisher of the Times.
“Right at the time that we got enough money from the sale of stock to start the erection of a plant, we were scurrying about looking for a man to employ as manager of the plant,” Stevens wrote.
“We had to design a plant and all of the various machinery needed, and the industry was so new that there just were not any men that we could find that were available to fill the job (of manager), and that knew how to do it.”
He said although he couldn’t remember just how it happened, “for the lack of somebody who was qualified & experienced, they turned it over to me as manager of the company.”
Stevens, who was working with his father in the abstract business, visited several plants that were in operation, “took some section ruled paper and drew up plats of each plant, showing how it was arranged, and what machinery they had. …”
They bought a site west of the railroad and south of Mulberry Street. After tearing down an old house there, they laid out a building 120 by 40 feet in size, with 16-foot walls.
Stevens was a long-time resident who had been through a number of hurricanes, so he was determined the building be constructed to withstand such winds.
He remembered he used 3-by-8-inch studs on 4-foot centers, with heavy bracing on all corners and a stiffening brace “as strong as another wall would have been” on the 120-foot length of the building.
Those precautions were effective, as the building did, in fact, stand through several of the area’s worst storms with no damage, only to burn many years later when it was being used as an auto repair shop.
Next week: How it worked.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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