Levi Jordan purchased over 2,000 acres in Brazoria County in 1848 and built the property into a substantial sugar and cotton plantation, constructing a two-story plantation house beginning in 1853 and, by 1860, forcing 134 enslaved people to labor in fields and processing facilities that produced sugar, corn, and cotton for market. After emancipation in 1865 ended the forced labor that had sustained sugar cultivation, the plantation's function shifted: the land was worked by formerly enslaved people as wage laborers and sharecroppers growing cotton, sustaining a Black farming community on the property for roughly three decades until the Martin family, who inherited the land after Jordan's 1873 death, converted it to cattle ranching in the 1890s and displaced that community. Beginning in 1986, archaeological excavations at the site recovered several hundred thousand artifacts from slave quarters and tenant sites, generating internationally significant evidence of the daily material, spiritual, and cultural lives of enslaved and later freed African Americans, including rare evidence of continued African-influenced ritual practices. The Texas Historical Commission acquired the property in 2007 and, following restoration completed around 2020, the site now functions as an interpretive historic site rather than a house museum, since the original plantation house no longer stands intact; it offers a visitor center, exhibits, an archaeology lab, and educational programming that present both the plantation's slave-labor economy and its postwar life as a freedpeople's farming community.