Angleton, county seat of Brazoria County, was founded in 1890 by two investors living in Brenham: Faustino Kiber, a Swiss immigrant and wholesale confectioner, and lawyer Lewis Randolph Bryan, a Brazoria County native and great-nephew of Stephen F. Austin. It was conceived as a market town serving surrounding farm tracts, which Kiber and Bryan also owned. Kiber and Bryan conveyed half the townsite to the newly organized Velasco Terminal Railway Company (VTR) to entice it to route its rail line from the mouth of the Brazos River through Angleton, named by the two developers for the wife of the general manager of the VTR. In 1896, after protracted controversy, Kiber and Bryan managed to get the county seat relocated to Angle-ton from the town of Brazoria. Highway development in the second half of the twentieth century emptied out downtown Angleton. The construction of South Freeway (TX 288) in the 1980s from downtown Houston to Lake Jackson stimulated Angleton's absorption into Houston's metropolitan orbit.
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