Richmond, Texas, the location of this story, is an actual town located on the Texas Coastal Plains about thirty miles southwest of Houston.  It is a small town of about eleven thousand souls. The county seat of Fort Bend County, Richmond was founded in the 1820’s and incorporated as a city in 1835, ten years before Texas became a state.

       Moses Austin had obtained the original land grants from the Mexican government allowing settlement in Texas, and his son Stephen F. Austin brought the settlers. The original three hundred settlers, known as the Old Three Hundred, received large grants of land on both sides of the Brazos River. The Brazos River flows through Richmond. Descendents of many of the Old Three Hundred still live in the Richmond area. The local cemetery contains the remains of Mirabeau Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas and the founder of the Texas public school system, Jane Long, the first white woman to give birth in Texas, and Erastus (Deaf) Smith, who had left the Alamo to tell the world of the Texans’ plight. Change does not occur rapidly in Richmond. Richmond has had the same mayor for over fifty-two years.

       Thompsons (originally Thompsons Camp) was an oil field camp about twenty miles south of Richmond and was the site of the initial oil discoveries in the area. At one time it had several hundred residents and its own small school. Only a few people still live in the area. Although a metallic building does exist at the end of a shell road across the railroad tracks in Thompsons, no toxic materials were ever manufactured there.

       There is a large foundation benefiting the residents of FortBendCounty. It has funded many charitable ventures:  the county library system, the county hospital, numerous parks, a large historical park, and an astronomical observatory. Many of the long time residents of Richmond are quite wealthy; their money is “quiet money” never spent ostentatiously but used discretely to support worthwhile charities.