Discreet Biohazard Cleanup Near West Arcola Arcola, TX

Arcola stands on land granted in 1822 to David Fitzgerald, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred settlers, in southeastern Fort Bend County.

By 1850, planter Jonathan Dawson Waters had assembled the whole league into one of the largest cotton and sugar plantations in Texas, which he named Arcola — the name the city still carries.

The Arcola community was formed predominantly by freed slaves who had worked the Arcola plantation, giving the town deep roots in Fort Bend County's African American history.

Arcola became a railroad junction in 1878, when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway was built through the county; by 1884 the community had a sugar mill, two steam gristmill-cotton gins, two general stores, a Baptist church, and a school.

After its plantation-era peak, Arcola shrank to only about 50 residents by 1914 and roughly 120 by 1949.

Arcola did not incorporate as a city until 1986, more than a century after its railroad-junction heyday.

Houston's suburban growth has transformed Arcola in recent decades: its population climbed from 666 in 1990 to 1,642 in 2010 and 2,034 at the 2020 census.

Arcola covers just 2.0 square miles at the junction of Farm Road 521 and State Highway 6, about 20 miles east of Richmond, within the greater Houston metropolitan area.

About two-thirds of Arcola's residents — 66.8 percent in the 2020 census — are Hispanic or Latino, and recent Census Bureau survey data put its average household size at about 3.2 people, well above the national average.