HUDGINS, TEXAS. Hudgins (Hudgins Settlement) is near the site of the Robert H. Williams plantation in a section of the rich Caney Creek bottomlands once known as plantation row, a mile north of Farm Road 457 and eight miles east of Bay City in east central Matagorda County. The largely black community grew up around land purchased by Jeno (Jno) Hudgins, a freed slave originally from Virginia, who bought the land at twenty-five dollars an acre in 1874. A local history reports that the site may once have been a stop on the Hawkinsville Tap of the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway, which built through the area between 1901 and 1903 and was closed by 1932. By 1952 the Hudgins cemetery, the nearby Pleasant Green cemetery, and a number of widely scattered dwellings remained in the area on an unpaved road. In 1990 the Hudgins settlement still had a number of houses and the cemeteries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Matagorda County Historical Commission, Historic Matagorda County (3 vols., Houston: Armstrong, 1986).
