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Arcola Plantation in Ft. Bend County, Texas
The plantation where Sienna now stands wasn’t called “Sienna Plantation.” It was called Arcola. And it was both one of the most valuable and most brutal plantations in Texas. Its owner, Jonathan Dawson Waters, left Alabama for the Republic of Texas in 1840, and began amassing the land where he’d eventually grow cotton and sugarcane.

The site is on part of the league granted in 1822 to David Fitzgerald, one of the Old Three Hundred. A large portion of the grant was sold to Jonathan Dawson Waters in the middle 1840s. By acquiring the whole league in 1850, Waters became the owner of one of the largest cotton and sugar plantations in Texas, which he called Arcola.

He continued buying land, including the plantation of his brother, Robert G. Waters, after being released from Perote prison, where he had been sent as a member of the Mier expedition.

By 1860, Arcola was one of the largest plantations in Texas, and Waters was the richest person in Fort Bend County. According to the 1860 Census, he owned 216 slaves, which made him the third-largest slave owner in Texas. He could do much as he pleased. According to the Texas State Historical Association, in 1847, after a property dispute with a white neighbor, he and a group of friends went to the man’s house, where Waters shot the unarmed man in front of his wife. There’s no record that he was tried for the murder.

In 1863 he purchased a colonial mansion later known as the Waters-Moody house and pictured in Historic Galveston Homes. The house was used as a hospital during the Civil War. The war cost Waters his fortune, because he donated $100,000 in gold to the Confederate government. He died in Houston on July 3, 1871, and was buried near his plantation home on the Brazos River. His will, made on November 2, 1866, was recorded in Galveston on February 12, 1872.