Named for Captain Wilhelm Zychlinski, a Polish nobleman who came to Brazoria County in the late 1880s and fell in love with the flowering pear trees in an area he called Pearland, Zychlinski Park was included in the original town site. Zychlinski bought 5991 acres of land by a railroad siding switch at a station called Mark Belt. Shortly after completing his town plat, he sold most of his holdings and disappeared, leaving his lawyer, J. W. O'Brian, to file the map of Pearland with the county Hall of Records on September 26, 1894. In 1911, land developers Allison and Richey set up offices in the Suburban Gardens Hotel, supported a music band, and outfitted the Suburban Gardens baseball team to promote Pearland. For nearly two generations, the people of Pearland played baseball in Zychlinski Park, remembering long Sunday afternoons on the sidelines and overtime games illuminated by car headlights. During the depression era, baseball in the park was a popular escape, and only World War II stopped play there. In 1946, a group of citizens signed a petition to allow the park to be used by the school district, and until the late 1990s it was the playground of the C. J. Harris Elementary School. Captain Witold Von Zychlinski, born in Poland in 1848 and identified as the founder of Pearland, married Eveline T. Gates, born in Baltimore, MD, in 1856, in Vienna, Austria, in 1871, and they had two children, William and Witold, Jr.