Editing Sweeny, Texas (section)

==History==
Sweeny's settlement, though not under this name, began before Texas was even a Republic. Imla Keep, a doctor and member of [[Stephen F. Austin]]'s [[Old Three Hundred]] colonists, received title to a league and labor of land that included the site of Sweeny on July 24, 1824. Keep eventually returned to Louisiana, and [[Martin Varner]] acquired the land. The land was named for John Sweeny, a Tennessee colonist who arrived with family members and 250 slaves in the area in 1833. He came after his sons, William Burrell and Thomas Jefferson Sweeny, had purchased land grants near the townsite. They purchased the land grants for the price of a load of mules, and came to examine their new land holdings in 1831. John Sweeny settled nearby, and in 1835, purchased the original Imla Keep League from Varner and constructed a house on the site.<ref name=":0" /> The home, today the Sweeny Plantation, a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, was occupied by original family members through the 1990s. The original home was built in 1837 by slaves using only bricks, nails, and cypress and [[Fraxinus|ash]] wood from the land. There were also 30 slave cabins made of [[Taxodium|cypress]] wood. The plantation had its own sawmill, sugar house, cotton gin, blacksmith shop, commissary, and a kiln for brick manufacture.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ci.sweeny.tx.us/historical_markers.htm|title=City of Sweeny {{!}} Historical Markers|website=www.ci.sweeny.tx.us|access-date=2016-10-23}}</ref>

The town was named for John Sweeny.<ref name=":0" />

The original town stood in a forest of hardwoods with soil twenty feet deep. Sweeny was briefly called Adamston when the [[St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway]] reached the area in 1905 and laid a side track lined with gardens to the community.<ref name=":0" /> A post office was established in 1895, closed in 1897, and was reestablished in 1909 as Sweeny. Sweeny's cotton gin and general store were built by 1908, a school was organized in 1911 with eleven students, and church services were held in 1912, when a Civic Club was founded to promote civic and social improvements. Around 1910 the R. D. McDonald Bernard River Land Development Company, which later gave a plot of land to each church denomination, purchased acreage in the area, cut it into lots, and sold it.<ref name=":0" />

Burton D. Hurd platted the townsite in 1911.  His Burton D. Hurd Industrial Land Company promoted ten-acre suburban garden farms in the area with the slogan, "Soil Richer Than the Valley of the River Nile" to prospective settlers.<ref name=":0" />

By 1914 the community had a hotel, a flour mill, three general stores, a cotton gin, a gristmill, a sawmill, and a population of 200. In the 1920s Sweeny shipped cotton, vegetables, live-oak parts for ships, and, for a time, bullfrogs raised by area farmers. In 1918 it had a brick factory and an orange orchard. Sweeny had an independent school system by 1912; school enrollment reached 236 by 1927, and by 1937 the community had three black schools and an all-grade white school with six teachers. The [[Ku Klux Klan]] operated briefly and held one cross-burning in the community.<ref name=":0" />

In 1934, oil was discovered in [[Old Ocean, Texas|Old Ocean]], creating development which made Sweeny prosper. In 1942, a government [[carbon black]] plant was built which was taken over by [[Phillips Petroleum]], which developed the facilities into a refinery, [[natural gas liquids]] center, and petrochemicals complex with pipelines to markets in the eastern United States. In 2000, Phillips Petroleum merged with [[Conoco Inc.]] to form ConocoPhillips. Sweeny's population in the latter 20th century has fluctuated from 3,087 to 3,699.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.khou.com/story/news/local/2014/07/24/12396014/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160313184758/https://www.khou.com/story/news/local/2014/07/24/12396014/|archive-date=2016-03-13|title=Small Muslim community struggles with 'terrorist' rumors|access-date=2023-08-06}}</ref>

<gallery widths="300px" heights="225px">
File:Sweeny TX Levi Jordan Plantation.jpg|[[Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site]] on FM 521
File:Sweeny TX VFW Post 8551 Howitzer.jpg|155&nbsp;mm Howitzer at VFW Post 8551 on FM 1459
</gallery>