Imperial Mercantile Co.

The following article from The Hand Book of Texas Online describes how the mercantile came to be:

Sugar Land, where all of the land and businesses were owned by the Kempner-Eldridge partnership, soon attracted a stable population largely made up of Germans and Czechsqqv from the Schulenberg-Flatonia area of Texas. The firm built homes and provided medical treatment for its employees, organized the Imperial State Bank in 1907, and established the Imperial Mercantile Company, a company store, a paper mill, various retail stores, a cotton gin, and a feed mill. The Sugar Land Manufacturing Company operated an acid plant, produced Imperial vinegar and pickles, and was involved in meatpacking, canning, and the processing of a variety of agricultural crops. In 1911 the firm built a plant for the Sealy Mattress Company as part of an effort to attract other manufactures and later completed a plant for the periodical Texas Farm and Industrial News, which became the Texas Commercial News. Convict labor worked the Ellis Plantation until 1914, when the company sold the property to the state of Texas as a prison farm, and for a time thereafter convicts continued to produce sugar (see PRISON SYSTEM). In 1917 the company merged the Imperial Sugar Company and Cunningham Sugar Company to form a new Imperial Sugar Company. Sugarland Industries was organized in 1919 as a trust estate to own and operate the conglomerate of Sugar Land businesses as departments or subsidiaries, and Imperial Sugar Company became a department in the new institution. Kempner and Eldridge remained the sole owners. Gus D. Ulrich served as general manager. Subsidiaries in time included Sugarland Motor Company, Sugar Land Truck Lines, and Texas National Warehouse Company. Affiliated firms included Belknap Realty, Alcorn and Foster Farms, Fort Bend Cattle Company, and Sugar Land Telephone. In 1924 the company was reorganized as a $5 million corporation, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s it successfully fought efforts of the Sugar Trust to control production as well as competition from the Texas Sugar Refining Company at Texas City.

A good read on Sugar Land can be found at Wikipedia.