Rosenberg was founded in 1883 by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway (GC&SF) on the south bank of the Brazos River, southwest of Richmond, at Rosenberg Junction where the GC&SF intersected the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway. Rosenberg was named for Galveston commission merchant, banker, and philanthropist Henry Rosenberg, one of the investors in the GC&SF Railway.
Rosenberg and Richmond represent the new-railroad-town versus old-county-seat-town confrontation. Rosenberg did not displace Richmond as Fort Bend's county seat, but with its railroad connections and more open, entrepreneurial attitudes, it outgrew Richmond. For most of the twentieth century Rosenberg was the county's largest town until suburban Houston began spilling over into Fort Bend County. South of the towns, the Southwest Freeway (U.S. 59) shaped a spatially exploded landscape in the 1980s and 1990s that brings metropolitan Houston to Rosenberg's back door.
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