William Goyens planted rice in southeast Texas in 1856, and David French grew it near Beaumont 10 years later. The first large commercial crop was planted in 1886, by Edgar Carruthers, Louis Bordages and Dan Wingate and shipped to New Orleans for milling. Most of the rice business centered around the Beaumont area, as it still does, which put Joseph Broussard in the right time at the right place to become a rice pioneer.
Broussard was born on Hillebrandt Bayou near what is now Beaumont in 1866. He worked cattle and delivered mail along Taylor's Bayou in Jefferson County and when a post office was established there in 1885, Broussard was named postmaster. He named the community La Belle to honor his fiance, Mary Bell Bordages. He bought interest in a gristmill in 1892, and converted it into a rice mill, the first commercially successful rice mill in the state.
With an interest now in helping other farmers grow rice, Broussard cofounded the Beaumont Irrigation Company and created a canal to hold and divert water to the rice fields. That made all the difference. In 1892, when he helped found the irrigation company, little more than a thousand Texas acres were planted in rice. More canals followed, and more rice farms, too. By 1903, Texas farmers had planted 234,000 acres.
That brings us to Seito Saibara, a native of Japan who came to the U.S. in 1901, when he was 40, to study theology. He was the youngest member of the Japanese parliament and its only Christian at a time when the Japanese government was decidedly anti-Christian. Part of Saibara's mission, which he gladly accepted, was to assume the presidency of Doshisha University at Kyoto, which had been founded by American Congregationalists. He was also asked to resign his seat in Parliament and go to school in America so that he could educate the Japanese people and government about Christianity.
Meanwhile, the Houston Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Pacific Railroad asked Saibara to teach them about growing rice. He accepted this mission with the same zeal that brought him to America in the first place. He arrived in Texas in 1903, and established the first Japanese Christian colony in the state by bringing his family and 30 colonists to help him grow rice on 1,000 acres he leased and later purchased. The Japanese faithful brought seed as a gift from the Emperor of Japan.
The first three years of production with the Japanese seed produced an average of 34 barrels of rice an acre, not quite double the amount that was being produced with native seeds. Most of what was produced was sold as seed to Louisiana and Texas farmers. C. J. Knapp, who founded the agriculture agent system in the U.S., helped ease government regulations against bringing seed rice into the country. That's how the rice industry came to the Texas Gulf Coast.
The early rice farmers of Southeast Texas were among the first to tap the resources of the Colorado River. They had been doing so for more than 40 years before the Highland Lakes in the Texas Hill Country were created; the rice farmers were, in fact, key to the creation of the dams.
Because of their own success with rice and their cooperation, the farmers have always had senior rights to the water. The immediate problem going forward is that there isn't enough water in the lakes to send to the farmers now, and there probably won't be for all of next year. The next major chapter in the history of the Texas rice industry is taking place now.
Like the earliest growers of rice in Texas, farmers now are back to growing strictly providence rice.
