CALVIT-HERNDON PLANTATION. The Calvit-Herndon Plantation, on the site of present Clute in southeastern Brazoria County, was a sugar plantation with a frame residence, office, and brick sugar house located on land purchased from the Wharton family. It was called Evergreen by its original owner, Alexander Calvit,^qv and known as Herndon Plantation when Calvit's only daughter inherited it and married John Hunter Herndon.^qv Herndon raised Arabian horses and had large herds of cattle, which, according to one source, were later purchased by Abel Head (Shanghai) Pierce.^qv By 1860 Herndon was one of the wealthiest men in the county; he had a summer house at Velasco, real property valued at $1,605,000, personal property estimated at $106,050, and forty slaves. Little is known about the plantation after the Civil War,^qv but it is likely that its operations ceased with the decline of the plantation economy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: James A. Creighton, A Narrative History of Brazoria County (Angleton, Texas: Brazoria County Historical Commission, 1975). Abner J. Strobel, The Old Plantations and Their Owners of Brazoria County (Houston, 1926; rev. ed., Houston: Bowman and Ross, 1930; rpt., Austin: Shelby, 1980). Ralph A. Wooster, "Wealthy Texans, 1860," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71 (October 1967).

Diana J. Kleiner