Sugar Valley

Sugar Valley is a widely dispersed rural community along Caney Creek and on State Highway 35 eight miles northeast of Bay City in northeastern Matagorda County. In the early 1900s a railroad stop called Sugar Valley was located on the New York, Texas and Mexican line between the stops of Ashwood and Grovedale, a few miles north of the present Sugar Valley site. By at least 1896 there were settlers on a sugar plantation at a place called Sugar Valley. George Robert Brown, an immigrant from Bavaria, Germany, settled in the Caney Creek area because of its rich bottomlands and built the brick sugar mill from which the community took its name. The mill operated from 1904 to 1922 and produced an average of 600 gallons of syrup a day, which it shipped by rail to the sugar factory at Sugar Land in Fort Bend County. Sugar Valley had a population between fifty and 100 in 1913. In 1984 the Sugar Valley 4-H club was one of nineteen active in the county. No population figures are available, but the 1989 county highway map showed Sugar Valley with one business. In 2000 the population was thirty-five.