From Historic Matagorda County and Wikipedia
The Cane Belt Railroad Company, eventually to become the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe, was chartered on March 4, 1898, and was built south from Eagle Lake.
The charter was amended to call for an extension to the tidewater of the Gulf of Mexico via Bay City, Matagorda County’s new county seat.
The men who signed the charter were president Captain William Dunovant, vice president William T. Eldridge, secretary treasurer Thomas Boulden, directors Perry Clark, Osburn Green, E. P. Newsome and John W. Thatcher, and board members Rudolph Greenbaum, Frank P. Herbert and William Jasper McGee.
The Cane Belt’s area was a major producer of sugarcane and the railroad was desired to ship sugar and other local crops to market.
Operating capital was $15,000 and headquarters were located in Eagle Lake.
It was generally thought that the Cane Belt had Freeport, at the mouth of the Brazos River, as its objective.
To forestall such an extension, it was said that the New York, Texas & Mexican Railway (eventually to become the Southern Pacific) built the Hawkinsville Branch beginning at Van Vleck.
The line was known as the “Hawkinsville Tap.”
To obtain the Cane Belt service, it was necessary for Bay City to put up a bonus. The Townsite Company deeded a number of unsold lots to the railroad builders.
A.H. Pierce put up $5,000 as a further bonus, for which he also was given some lots.
Under the terms of the bonus, July 1, 1901 was the date set for the operation of the passenger train into Bay City.
Late in the day of June 30, 1901, track-laying crews - consisting of some 300-400 convicts from the State Prison Farm - reached the outskirts of the town.
Immediately the construction train’s engine backed up to Lane City - named for Jonathan Lane, then president of the Cane Belt Railroad - picked up a couple of coaches, and returned to Bay City that night with the first passenger train, thus complying with the terms of the bonus.
The Cane Belt Railroad, as it was called (now Santa Fe) came into Matagorda in December, 1901.
George B. Culver worked hard to have the line extended into Matagorda to the “turn around” or end of the line.
He gave the land for the depot and tracks.
This old iron horse “the Try Daily” was the only “religious” train anywhere around.
It ran six days a week - between Sealy and Matagorda - but rested on the seventh day.
For years the “Cane Belt” ran a “Saturday Special” for those all along the line to come to Matagorda to enjoy the cool Gulf breeze and dance until midnight at the old pavilion.
These young people (with their mothers as chaperones) came with large trunks filled with beautiful dance dresses and stayed at the old Matagorda Hotel on the Bay.
Some would leave on Monday but most stayed over the several weeks to enjoy those fabulous Saturday night dances at the pavilion.
By reaching Matagorda, the Cane Belt fulfilled the term of the charter for a tidewater terminus between the mouths of the Brazos and Colorado rivers.
In 1902 a disagreement between two of the railroad's chief promoters proved deadly.
In 1901 Dunovant built a sugarcane refinery at the Cane Belt Railroad's Lakeside station.
The strategically located facility was capable of producing 100 tons of sugar per day.
At first the railroad was profitable, with $20,000 net profit in 1901. But the next year the company began to suffer from uneven cash flow and construction debt.
A dispute over management of the railroad between Dunovant and Eldridge proved fatal.
On Aug. 11, 1902, Dunovant boarded the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway at Simonton.
Eldridge, who was already aboard the train, immediately emptied his revolver into Dunovant and then smashed the gun down on his victim's skull.
Dunovant, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War who lost his left arm at the Battle of the Crater and who had previously threatened to kill Eldridge, did not survive the encounter.
Before Eldridge could be brought to trial, Dunovant's partisans tried to exact revenge.
On Oct. 4, 1902, W.T. Cobb fired a shotgun blast at Eldridge but missed. Cobb was later acquitted.
On June 6, 1904, one of Dunovant's brothers-in-law, W.E. Calhoun fired a bullet through Eldridge's right lung from ambush but his intended target survived.
Eldridge was tried for Dunovant's murder in November 1904 but found not guilty based on his plea of self-defense.
A few weeks later Eldridge found that Calhoun was a passenger on the same train and gunned him down also.
In January 1907 Eldridge was tried for Calhoun's murder at Bellville and acquitted again.
Eldridge left the area and became partners with Isaac Herbert Kempner who founded the Imperial Sugar Company at Sugar Land. He died in Houston in 1932.
Amid all this turmoil, the Cane Belt Railroad came close to bankruptcy.
On Nov. 11, 1903, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe bought the railroad for $1.6 million, including $850,000 for stock and $750,000 for outstanding bonds.
By 1904 the line was in operation from Sealy to Matagorda on the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 11, 1905, the Texas Legislature passed a law allowing the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe to lease or sell the Cane Belt Railroad to its subsidiary, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe.
That railroad agreed to lease the Cane Belt on July 1, 1905.
The world’s largest deposits of sulphur was discovered at Gulf Hill, six miles east of Matagorda.
The sulphur industry furnished a tremendous amount of traffic for the Cane Belt rail line until the late 1920s.
By the 1920s, the local sugarcane industry collapsed.
Several events caused the downfall of the local sugarcane business. Sugarcane required an enormous amount of manual labor to cut and load into wagons.
Since the local population could not meet the demand for workers, the planters leased convicts from the Texas penitentiary system.
In 1898 about 700 prisoners were harvesting sugarcane. Mutinies among the convict crews occurred because of the harsh conditions in the cane fields.
Molasses imported from abroad and sugar beets grown in the United States proved to be cheaper to convert into sugar.
In 1910 the Texas legislature passed a law forbidding the leasing of convicts on humanitarian grounds.
In December 1911 there was a hard freeze which destroyed half of the sugarcane crop.
By the 1920s the local sugarcane crop dwindled to insignificance.
However, as sugarcane shipments fell off, rice shipments on the railroad increased substantially.
But the economic salvation of the railroad proved to be the discovery of the world’s largest sulphur deposits at Gulf Hill near Matagorda in 1917.
The Gulf Hill mine was opened in 1919 and sulphur shipments were soon a large part of the railroad's traffic.
In 1926 the Texas Railroad Commission determined the value of the Cane Belt Railroad at $2.5 million though evidence hinted that the real value may have been nearly $3.5 million.
In the 1920s, another sulphur mine was found near Boling. On Feb. 1, 1928, the Cane Belt asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for permission to build a new line from Lane City to Thompsons.
Previously, the sulphur was shipped to Sealy before it could connect to a rail line to Galveston.
Construction of the new branch would shorten the rail distance to Galveston by 65 miles
The Gulf Hill mine near Matagorda played out in 1937 but by this time the Boling mine was shipping large quantities of sulphur.
By the 1930s the volume of agricultural traffic on the Cane Belt had steeply declined. By this time shipments of rice, livestock, oyster shell for road surfacing and other freight began to fall.
Sulphur was the backbone of the railroad. In 1945, in addition to 3,824 bales of cotton, the Cane Belt shipped 17,789 carloads of sulphur, 1,613 of oyster shell, 1,122 of petroleum products, 354 of rice and 82 of fruits and vegetables.
In the years after the war a train crew's workday usually started at Sealy at 6:45 am and ended at Matagorda at 10:45 pm.
The crews stayed overnight in bunk cars at Matagorda and began the return journey the next day.
The train typically carried an engineer, fireman, conductor and two brakemen.
During harvest season a third brakeman was added to the crews. Cane Belt service was unpopular and the more senior workers of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe usually opted to work on the Galveston main line.
Passenger service was included on the Cane Belt by attaching a car to the end of the trains.
In December 1948, the Cane Belt was absorbed by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway and the railroad ceased to exist.
Passenger service between Sealy and Matagorda on the former Cane Belt line was ended on March 12, 1956.
The Railroad Commission permitted the abandonment of the Matagorda station in 1967 and the tracks were removed.
Demand for sulphur decreased beginning in the 1950s. The great sulphur mine at Newgulf near Boling stopped production in 1993. In the 1990s almost the entire line was abandoned and the track removed.
By 1998, the only part of the old Cane Belt system that still served rail shippers was south of Bay City. In that year, the Celanese Chemical and LyondellPetrochemical companies shipped approximately 10,000 railcars through Bay City from their facilities.
By 2013, only a small portion of the line south of Bay City was operating as part of the BNSF Railway.