king ranch family tree

He also said that they repeatedly told him how excited they were about having him bring his skills to the board of directors. Also, during that time, future President Lyndon B. Johnson worked as his legislative assistant. There was a chance, a good chance if they got some rain, that the cattle division would have one of its most profitable years in a decade. King married Henrietta M. Chamberlain on December 10, 1854 in Brownsville, Texas. Taylor Prewitt is the newsletter editor for Texas Monthly. Richard Louis King (1824-1885) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree Richard Louis King (1824 - 1885) Capt. But he and his four siblings, who had created a corporation to control their spread, splitting the stock equally, had made a quixotic vow: The King Ranch would stay together and remain under family ownership no matter what happened. At least initially, Hunt did act more like an asset manager than a visionary. Did you like this post? Edna Ferber used Bob and his wife, Helen, the daughter of a Kansas congressman whom Bob had married after a seventeen-day courtship, as models for her novel Giant. The Texas Fever Tick created significant problems for the marketing of cattle from South Texas. During the thirties the family successfully negotiated several long-term leases with Humble Oil and Refining Company (now ExxonMobil) for oil and gas rights to the 1.15 million acres of King Ranch property. King Ranch, meanwhile, is split across multiple parcels. Every afternoon he would shuffle to his car and have a driver take him from one pasture to another. When their fathers health declined in the early twentieth century, two of the five children born to Robert J. and Alice King Kleberg assumed responsibility for the ranch. In 1860, King and Kenedy jointly purchased a large ranch, Santa Gertrudis, jointly managing livestock, as R. King and Company. Today neither is with the ranch. A West Texas Roundup, Without All That Hoopin and Hollerin, Texans, Meet Your Adorable, Bloodthirsty New Neighbors. Robert Grunnah, a principal at the Texas land specialty firm Novus Realty Advisors, told Bloomberg in July 2021 that if Waggoner Ranch is worth $725 million, King Ranch is worth $1.1 billion. Sugdens mother was Mary Etta Kleberg, the daughter of one of the original five Kleberg children. Under his management, the King Ranch became the greatest beef-producing operation in the United States. King Ranch is a corporation that is privately owned by around 60 people who are the descendants of Richard King. We report on vital issues from politics to education and are the indispensable authority on the Texas scene, covering everything from music to cultural events with insightful recommendations. Acquisitions came through the purchase of property in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and West Texas, and through joint ventures and partnerships in Florida. Many, including Tios two brothers, moved to the more exclusive neighborhoods of Texas cities and made their living as investors or venture capitalists. (Because of the ranchs reputation as a paradise for trophy wildlifeit is home to white-tailed deer, Nilgai antelope, quail, and feral hogscorporations such as Dresser Industries and Triton Energy were willing to spend $8 an acre for a lease, sharing the scrubland with the cattle.) They kept clapping, perhaps because they were not sure what else to do at such an awkward moment. The land itself roams over "six counties, is divided into four parcels." Following the war, King removed to Matamoros, until he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. Daniel Vaughn is the countrys first barbecue editor, and he has eaten more barbecue than you have. He said they gave him no reason for his firing except that a change was needed. According to those who worked with him, Tio followed the old family creed that a cattleman never left a herd until all the cattle work was finished. When King died, Kleberg took over the management of the ranch in 1885. Outside, it was another hot afternoon, so hot that the heat was bouncing off the scrub brush. 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Employees at the ranch headquarters sensed almost immediately that there was going to be a personality clash between the buttoned-down Hunt and the cigar-wielding Tio. The next day, Hunt flew to Kingsville on the companys jet and demanded to know why Tio had confronted him in such a manner in front of the board. He continued to buy more cheap landthe familys guiding philosophy was Buy land and never selland he persuaded the railroad to build its tracks through the ranch and make a stop there, where he established the town of Kingsville. She . #7 King Ranch Heirs 911,215 acres Tio, who was fluent in Spanish, had received his nickname as a teenager from the Kineos, who thought he had the same drive as his great-uncle Bob (tio is uncle in Spanish). Jones Family Ranch - 255,000 acres Located on the South Texas coast near Corpus Christi, the Jones family ranches were founded by W. W. Jones in 1897 on land that had been part of the Las. No family stays as united as the Klebergs through five generations without strong traditions and some fresh blood. His interest would also light on a lovely young lady in the King household the captains youngest daughter, Alice Gertrudis King. Other upbreeding programs led to the development of the countrys top quarter horses and some of Americas most notable thoroughbreds including 1946 Triple Crown winner ASSAULT. The ranch has long been known as the Walled Kingdom, and indeed it looks like an invulnerable fortress, impervious to change. Then Bob Kleberg did something that had not been done anywhere in the world in the previous two hundred years: He created a new breed of cattle. King Ranch now covers 825,000 acresmore land than the state of Rhode Island. Times were changing, and the board declared that the ranch no longer needed a domineering Bob Kleberglike leader. Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke bought Waggoner Ranch this summer, according to Forbes, and though the terms of the sale werent disclosed, the nearly-800-square-mile property was listed at $725 million. Soon after Richards death, Henrietta asked Robert Kleberg, the husband of her youngest daughter, Alice (the Kings had four children), to run the ranch, a herculean task considering that it was about $500,000 in debt. Some day, the oil and gas royalties will run out, and the future heirs, who no doubt will have even less contact with the ranch than todays heirs, might wonder why they are burdened with so much property that is not generating any income. He needed a cow that was as hardy as a Longhorn, able to endure the sun, yet capable of eating just about anything. At family meetings Tio said that the ranch should become more of what he called a resource-management business as opposed to strictly a cattle business. In addition to all of these accomplishments, Mr. Kleberg built a facility that was, for a time, the largest cattle rail operation in the world. And he believed the family had a responsibility to Kingsville. Tio always made sure to allocate about $150,000 of his departments annual budget for Kingsville civic projects, from Fourth of July parades to livestock shows, and he helped develop a plan to revitalize the downtown. What changed the King Ranch as much as anythingand what ultimately led to Tios downfallwas the family members growing preoccupation with their stock dividends, coupled with the entirely legitimate fear that oil and gas production on the ranch would start declining as early as the year 2000. Another became a champion equestrian rider in Florida. Although it is hard to imagine an increasingly faceless corporation arousing much interest outside Texas with such a product (the idea might have worked fifty years ago, when Assault was winning the Triple Crown and people were talking about the King Ranch), the idea demonstrated how far Hunt was willing to go to increase revenues. Tell me right now, Jack. April 14, 1885: King dies. Tio Kleberg, had called a Friday-morning staff meeting at the ranch headquarters, just outside Kingsville. Christian Wallace writes about West Texas, oil and gas, music, cowboys, history, and history-making Texans. They shipped food from their ranch, and munitions, medicine, and cotton to or from Europe. But it has never occurred to me, not once, that I should be anywhere else but right here on this ranch.. Management developed ranching operations overseas with land purchases in Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, Venezuela, Spain, and Morocco. Whats more, because of 3D seismic technology, deeper oil wells were being successfully drilled on King Ranch land, making the royalties higher than ever. In 1934, Alice King Kleberg consolidated much of the ranch property into a corporation, with her children as stockholders. What Alexander and Clement did believe was the right thing for the shareholders was for them to support Hunt over Tio. When Hunt suggested that the ranch didnt need to buy trucks with air conditioning or power locks on the doors, Tio bristled, telling him, These trucks are the cowboys offices! According to one source at the ranch, after Hunt asked Tio why there wasnt a higher percentage of weaned cattle on the ranch, an exasperated Tio went to his cattle managers and told them that Hunt just didnt understand South Texas. Small and wiry, with sharp blue eyes and an Old West gunfighters mustache that drooped over the sides of his mouth and curled up at the ends, he carried an unlit Henry Clay cigar in one hand and didnt hesitate to use his other hand to slap a cowboy on the back and encourage him to work harder. Tio told me that he was so distraught at the hospital that he picked up the phone, called Hunt in Houston, and shouted, Jack, Scott Wrights dead, and I hope youre happy. Then he slammed down the phone. He had to look into the eyes of the descendants of the original Mexican villagers who had followed Captain King into Texas and tell them there were few jobs left for them and fewer for their children. John Spong writes primarily about popular culture. The town of Kingsville, Texas is named for King. You cant do that without fighting climate change. The King Ranch legacy fueling conservationist @jay4txlands land commish run: https://t.co/vQ5fD7anq0. Their twenty-eight years of devotion to King Ranch, its land and its people, are beyond reproach.. All Rights Reserved. By crossbreeding Brahman bulls, native to India, with British Shorthorn stock, the ranch produced the Santa Gertrudis, recognized as the first American breed of beef cattle and the first cattle breed to be recognized in the world in more than a century. It was, in retrospect, a startling achievement: Civilization had been brought to El Desierto de los Muertos. Tio was startled, for instance, when Hunt asked him for the odometer readings of the cowboys pickups to see if they were driving too much. But around the ranch headquarters and in Kingsville, the real story was spreading like a prairie fire. Corpus Christi has a high school named for King. In 1863, the Union General Nathaniel Prentice Banks attempted to interrupt this trade with his forces capturing Brownsville, Texas and raiding and destroying the King Ranch, but King avoided the raid and resumed business in 1864, earning a considerable fortune over the course of the war. Bob Kleberg died in 1974, and Tios father, Dick, was too sick with emphysema to take his place. Today, the Santa Gertrudis is the most prevalent cattle breed in Australia. There was a Kleberg-owned bank and a Kleberg-owned newspaper, and the streets were named after family members. video . The companys only significant purchase was a 5 percent interest in a small bio-tech firm in California that makes environmentally friendly pesticides. When she died, he received all of her stock. Together, they initiated a series of innovations that kept King Ranch successful and at the leading edge of the ranching industry. While Johnson was trying to. Using the oil wealth he had secured, Bob expanded the ranch to millions of acres around the world. It was also at this time that King Ranch acquired the prized Thoroughbred stallions that went on to produce, among others, ASSAULT, 1946 winner of the prestigious Triple Crown, and MIDDLEGROUND, the 1950 winner of the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes. Taking a huge gamble, Tio hired breeding experts and budgeted about $4 million for fertility studies, DNA mapping, and breeding programs. Thank you for visiting king ranch heirs family tree page. In 2015, it was expanded and renamed the King Ranch Chair for Business Leadership, a position now held by Senior . Because the eldest son, Richard, was already in law school when his father became ill, the reins of the ranch were handed in 1918 to the second son, Robert Bob Kleberg, Jr., a serious young man with a squeaky voice and an ungraceful demeanor. Hunt told me that when he arrived at the King Ranch offices in Houston, I did what any executive would do, which was to find out what was generating good returns and what was generating poor returns. And one of the first areas he looked at was the ranchs beef business. Soon after the 1925 death of Bobs grandmother, Henrietta King, the barely profitable ranch was saddled with a $3 million inheritance tax. Houston, TX 77056 Rumors about him flew. But lets face it, Tio adds with a shrug. In the late eighties a momentous family vote was taken to look for chief executives and board members outside the family, specialists in value-added processing and least-cost production and vertical integration. If Captain King would have been surprised to learn that Richard Sugden was his largest stockholder, imagine what he might have said upon hearing that the new chairman of the board of directors was a man named Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst and professor emeritus at Harvard Business School who could barely stay on a horse but who was a nationally renowned corporate consultant. Oil and gas royalties drove another growth spurt for King Ranch during this period. Despite the ranchs past glories, its profitability was in the oil and gas underneath the land that had been bringing in at least $20 million annually since the late sixties. He never once said to me, Tio, this is where I want to go with the cattle and farming operations. All he had to do was tell me what he wanted, and Id do it. But the drought lasted three years, costing the King Ranch several million dollars in unrecoverable feed costs and pasture leases. Market Realist is a registered trademark. But today the King Ranch, like so much of Texas, is well on its way to creating a new identity for itself, one in which the rugged individuals are not those who move cattle but those who move money. The nucleus of King Ranch formed around 2 irregularly shaped pieces of wilderness of 614,000-Acre (abt 60 major land purchases) King Ranch (today ~1,000,000-Acres). If there is a reason that the King Ranch has remained such a mythic Texas symbol, it is the family that created ita once larger-than-life clan that loved and fought and persevered with a relentless passion. Meet the Kleberg family, which has owned the 825,000-acre ranch and agribusiness for generations now. That young lawyers name was Robert Justus Kleberg, and he married Alice in 1886, during the year after Captain Kings death in 1885. His widow is left. Tio was in a denim jacket and Janell in a windbreaker. People laughed when he announced that he wanted to own all the land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande and then control a three-mile-wide strip from Brownsville to Kansas, on which his cattle would be driven to market. To keep the profits rolling in, King Ranch, Inc., was turning into a highly competitive multinational agribusiness and energy corporation. Henrietta, who in 1915 moved to New York with her first husband, later an executive with Celanese. By the 1870s, Kings outfit, R. King and Company, was sending tens of thousands of cattle north on the trails. For the 52-year-old Klebergthe great-great-grandson of Richard King, who had bought this land in 1853the 825,000-acre ranch was like a religion. [2] King retained the Santa Gertrudis ranch as part of his expanding King ranch while Kenedy purchased the Laureles Ranch, near Corpus Christi. The Founding of King Ranch The story starts in the mid-1830s with an eleven-year-old boy indentured by his destitute family to a jeweler in New York City. The boy who started as an impoverished, indentured jewelers apprentice became an adventuresome, hard working and visionary businessman who, by the time of his death in 1885, had made his indelible mark on the landscape and taken his place as a titan among the ranks of the tamers of the Texas range. For a more detailed chart see: Family tree of English monarchs (from Alfred the Great through .Queen Elizabeth I); Family tree of Scottish monarchs (from Kenneth MacAlpin through James VI and I); Family tree of Welsh monarchs; and the Family tree of the British royal family for the period from Elizabeth I . Leave them blank to get signed up. Jay, a conservationist and filmmaker, is running for state land commissioner, hoping to succeed current commissioner George P. Bush, whos running for attorney general. Those days are over. In 1934, Alice King Kleberg consolidated much of the ranch property into a corporation, with her children as stockholders. Lee is said to have chosen the location for the King's home on the King ranch, as a location easy to defend. Richard Louis King (1824-1885) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree Richard King, was born July 10, 1824 in Orange County, New York He was apprenticed to a New York City jeweler about the age of nine. Tio and I worked well together, he said. You Can Lead Cows to Water, But Can You Make Em Swim Across the Colorado River? By the time of his death in 1885, Richard King had created a legacy that would become known, far and wide, as the birthplace of American ranching. There was a long, embarrassed silence around the table. And in such a corporation, where success is gauged on the financial returns of its investments, a familys heritage only goes so far. The roundup for the fall calf crop was just beginning; more than nine thousand calves had to be weaned in a mere three weeks, and they were the heaviest on record, many weighing seven hundred pounds. It is a struggle that has changed them, divided them, and perhaps even separated them from the very ideals that once made the King Ranch so great. It doesnt matter where we are living, says Richard Sugden. In his direct, ranch-raised speaking style, he liked to talk about doin things the King Ranch waydoin it right, doin it with quality. He made a point of riding horseback through every pasture. Her first husband, a cowboy, died shortly after the birth of their only child, Belton Kleberg B Johnson. Her daughters, Ida Louise (Illa) and Henrietta (Etta), married two of the men who run the ranch today, Jim Clement and John Armstrong (Tom Armstrongs nephew), now in their sixties.

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