Brazos County History
FB beginnings | History of County

The Brazos County Farm Bureau was founded and chartered on November 27, 1951.

Founding members included:

D.D. Catalena	C.J. Porterfield
Mike L. Perrone	N.L. Salvato
J. A. Rychlik	John Perrone
Chas Merka	Tony Angonia
Lee John Fazzino	L.E. Ellwood
Vince Court	George G. Chance
Ed Skuball

Bryan is the county seat for Brazos County, named after the nearby Brazos River. College Station is the other major community in the county.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, cotton increasingly dominated this county's agriculture. Cotton acreage grew from 28,044 in 1880 to almost 44,000 in 1890. In 1910, it rose to an all-time high of 72,275, almost a third of all improved acres in the county. About half the cotton acreage was usually allotted to corn, the second major crop in the county.

Brazos County was like most other counties in the Southern states, having large numbers of small farms with many of them worked by tenants and sharecroppers. The number of farms increased from 666 in 1870 to 1,630 in 1880 and 2,088 in 1890. By1900, about 60 percent of the 2,613 farms in the county were worked by tenants and sharecroppers. As a percentage of the total cropland harvested, cotton land reached its peak around 1930, when more than 64,000 of the 88,224 acres harvested were used to grow cotton.

County farming began to change in response to changing technologies and opportunities. During the Great Depression, much of the rural workforce left the county to seek work in cities across Texas with some even leaving the state. By 1940, the number of farms dropped to 1,773, comparable to the number of farms in 1880. Mechanized farming began in the bottomlands of the county along the rivers in the late 1920s and slowly spread to other parts of the county. With the loss of the rural labor supply after World War II, farmers consolidated their holdings and turned to tractors, mechanical cotton harvesters, and other machines to work their fields.

During the same time the county was becoming more urban, the building of a network of rural roads in the 1930s and 1940s transformed the Brazos County countryside. As late as 1930, the majority of farms were located on dirt roads. Twenty years later, only 538 were still on dirt roads. Even though only 48 farms had electricity in 1930, rural electrification brought power to most of the county's farms by the early 1960s.

By the mid-twentieth century, county farmers had increasingly turned away from the old agricultural staples of corn and cotton and had moved on to cattle ranching. In the 1980s, cotton was generally grown on approximately 12,000 acres, only 15 percent of the acreage used for cotton in 1925. The number of cattle increased from 25,354 in 1940 to 42,545 in 1950 and fluctuated between 45,000 and 57,000 through the 1980s. As part of the shift to cattle, feed crops of hay, oats, and wheat became more important in the county in the decades following 1950.

Oil was first discovered in the county in 1942 and became an important part of the county economy in the 1970s. By 1990, a total of 73,427,789 barrels had been produced.