[2] King retained the Santa Gertrudis ranch as part of his expanding King ranch while Kenedy purchased the Laureles Ranch, near Corpus Christi. In 1995 the committee found Jack Hunt, the head of the publicly held Tejon Ranch Company in California, a 270,000-acre operation that involved commercial real estate, farming, recreation, mineral extraction, and ranching (14,000 head of cattle). Maybe that was the reason, some of the cattle managers guessed, that their boss, Stephen J. A family committee was formed to hire the best chief executive in the country, someone who knew the intricacies of a commodities-oriented business like King Ranch, Inc. (Around campfires at the ranch in the summers, Kleberg would tell his grandchildren, Do what you can with the ranch, but above all, keep the family together.) Yet neither Clement nor Alexandersophisticated young businessmen, adept at corporate affairswas particularly interested in cattle ranching. Following the war, King removed to Matamoros, until he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. When he died she married her neighbor Tom Armstrong and returned to the ranch. 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. 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. Meanwhile, life at the ranch had to go on. April 14, 1885: King dies. The jeweler was a difficult man, and the boy was chafing under the man's mistreatment. 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. Taylor Prewitt is the newsletter editor for Texas Monthly. Both expected to take over the ranch after Bobs death in 1974, but they both lost out, in turn, to Jim Clement. They voted to take 75 percent of the royalties, leaving the ranch corporation with the remaining 25 percent. From 1955 to 1968 she was the chairman of the board. Theres a lot of tradition in this family about persevering in the face of negative odds, says John Alexander. The men who married into the family have always helped sustain it. The Kleberg family, descended from Richard King, held sway over the family's holdings from an austere whitewashed mansion on the ranch. Im in the middle of the Alazon pasture on a good quarter horse, Tio replied, doing what I love to do., In a Texas Monthly story about the King Ranch almost twenty years ago (The Last Empire, October 1980), writer William Broyles described Tio Kleberg, who was then just 34, as the familys rising young star, determined to be as worthy as the Klebergs who had come before him. 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. Denman, the former attorney for the ranch, remembers Dick telling Bob, If I can be of any use to you, I want to work. He was a deft roper and a fine horseman, one of the best all-around cowboys on the ranch. For the next 56 years he ran the ranch. He was the younger brother to John (I) and was born sometime after the events of 1883. Members of Hunts staff also had talks with Louis Vuitton and Este Lauder about nationally distributing a line of King Ranch luggage and King Ranch colognes to be sold in department stores. Weldon Wilson Drove Cattle the Old-fashioned Way. Tell me right now, Jack. He believed a family leader should be there to answer the phone in the middle of the night if there was a problem. In other respects, however, Tio was unabashedly old-fashioned. Robert Justus (Mr. Bob) Kleberg acted as head of the ranchs operations and continued as President and CEO for the next fifty years. King Ranch, meanwhile, is split across multiple parcels. Bobby Shelton's mother, Sarah, was a tomboy and only wanted to ranch. Jay, a conservationist and filmmaker, is running for state land commissioner, hoping to succeed current commissioner George P. Bush, whos running for attorney general. Kleberg was a Corpus Christi lawyer with little ranching experience, yet he quickly transformed himself into a daring and creative cattleman, introducing scientific methods to the cattle business, digging artesian wells to counter the devastating drought of the early 1890s (known as the Great Die), and experimenting with various breeds, from English Shorthorns to Herefords, to see which could best survive the unforgiving climate. Robert Justus, Jr., took over effective control of the ranch at 22 during World War I, when his father suffered a stroke and his older brother, Richard, was with the Army. Houston, TX 77056 He suggested that cotton and milo farming be increased at the ranch and that more than half of its land be leased to commercial hunting opertions. When Captain Richard King, a hell-raising, fistfighting, Rio Grande steamboat pilot from New York City, paid $300 for 15,500 South Texas acres, he knew nothing about cattle. He was buried in San Antonio; upon his wife's death in 1925, he was re-interred with her on the King Ranch, at Kingsville. He continued acquiring land until his death in 1885, when the ranch had 614,000 acres (2,480 km2). He and Alice had five children, three daughters and two sons. He is also linked to several filibustering exhibitions in northern Mexico, attempts to seize Mexican territory by force. 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. Meet the Kleberg family, which has owned the 825,000-acre ranch and agribusiness for generations now. If you fill out the first name, last name, or agree to terms fields, you will NOT be added to the newsletter list. The rainfall is viciously unpredictable, the droughts are frequent, and the grass is so sparse that a South Texas rancher needs about twenty acres to feed one cow. How, on a ranch where the bonds of family meant so much, could its most loyal son be deposed? Imagine what Captain Kings reaction would be if he knew that a doctor at a Wyoming ski resort owned more of King Ranch than anyone else, marvels one family member. He seemed unusually serious when he and his wife, Janell, arrived outside the stables, where he had asked everyone to gather. Lee is said to have chosen the location for the King's home on the King ranch, as a location easy to defend. 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. When Tio Kleberg became head of the ranches in 1977 at the age of 31, he quickly proved himself to be a driven and ambitious cattleman, determined to bring the most modern innovations to the cattle and farming operations. 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. But by the nineties, the values that were once so important to the King Ranch family no longer translated to the bottom line. Their daughter Alice and her husband, Robert Klebergshown with their children in the turn-of-the-century photograph at the rightfounded the family that sustained it. Today neither is with the ranch. Sugdens mother was Mary Etta Kleberg, the daughter of one of the original five Kleberg children. But. This discovery was a welcome end to a decade that started with a drought so severe it was known as the great die-up.. Through the late seventies and into the eighties, the ranch was run by a committee of senior family members led by Jim Clement, an East Coasttrained businessman who had married the daughter of one of Bob Klebergs sisters. In a year with sufficient rainfall, the cattle division added from $1 million to $3 million to the companys annual pre-tax profits. According to company insiders, the King Ranchs revenues started rising, jumping from around $100 million in the late eighties to $148 million in 1993 and $183 million in 1994. To get rid of Tio, Hunt knew he needed unanimous support from his eight-member board. When the familys board of directors decided in the mid-eighties that the ranch could no longer support so many Kineosan estimated seven hundred of them worked on the ranchTio was ordered to make the cutbacks. He traveled to an impoverished hamlet in Mexico where many vaqueros were known to live. Mary Etta had spent much of her childhood on the ranch, married a Naval officer, and given birth to Richard, her only child, who was raised mostly in California, Wyoming, and overseas. Alice and Robert Kleberg ended up with more than 800,000 acres, which they and their children incorporated in 1934 as the King Ranch. Geni requires JavaScript! Tio had gambled that he would be able to wait out the drought up north and avoid selling the herd at a loss. Outside, it was another hot afternoon, so hot that the heat was bouncing off the scrub brush. Hunt would not publicly say how he planned to put his own stamp on the King Ranch. Its possible youll see the next generations sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of the old family property so they can bring some better dividends for that year, Tio says. 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. In reality, the two men were on a collision course. AUSTIN Jay Kleberg, a conservationist and filmmaker who is part of the family that has owned the famous King Ranch in South Texas for generations, said Thursday he's running for state. He became a first lieutenant, stationed in El Paso, and was offered a chance to move up in rank. According to the Corpus Christi Caller Times, Jay grew up on King Ranch and produced a documentary about the Rio Grande called The River and the Wall. Mary Lewis Kleberg, Dicks wife, took over this task when Helen died in 1963, assisted by Illa Clement and Etta Armstrong. Leave them blank to get signed up. 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. Family tree of Richard King Born 1825-07-10 in Orange County, New York, Ranch Owner Show generations: 3 4 5 8 all (Level: 99) Write a Comment, Richard King born 1825-07-10 in Orange County, New York - 1885 (Ranch Owner) Henrietta Maria King born 1856-04-17 in Brownsville, Cameron, Texas, USA - 1917 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). Those experiences taught Jay the value of hard work and land stewardship, he said. 8 spot on the newest list that shows the biggest landowners in the United States. Thats what I really look to when I think about King Ranch, not just one individual here or there., But can this family stay together as a family without its connection to the landa land that once defined them, sometimes overwhelmed them, but ultimately enlarged them? Richard M. Kleberg, one of Robert and Alices sons, served seven terms as the U.S. Representative from Texass 14th congressional district between 1931 and 1945, for example. Cause of death: Stomach cancer - Apr 14 1885, Chamberlain Cemetery, Kingsville, Texas, United States, New York City, New York County, New York, United States, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, United States, Chamberlain Cemetery, Kingsville, Kleberg County, Texas, United States, Kingsville, Kleberg County, Texas, United States. The boy who started as an impoverished, indentured jewelers apprentice became and 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. But Hunt told the board of directors that Tios job should be done by two menone to run the King Ranchs farming operations across the nation and someone else to run the cattle business. It was what gave meaning to his life. But it has never occurred to me, not once, that I should be anywhere else but right here on this ranch.. 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. Nor is there any guarantee that Tio will last on the board past his one-year term. . Yet during the twice-yearly roundups, time seems to stand still. He said they gave him no reason for his firing except that a change was needed. Three Riverway, Suite 1600 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. Hunt and other board members could always ask him not to stand for reelection, or Tio might quit. A traditional Alpine barn, this four-bedroom property has been beautifully renovated to create a modern family home. Richard Mifflin (Mr. Dick) Kleberg, Sr., who served as a seven-term member of the US Congress, handled the legal and financial aspects of the ranch. [4] It is mainly a cattle ranch, but also produced the Triple Crown winning racehorse Assault . A board member went so far as to tell Johnson, One dictator in this family is enough. The brothers announced they were walking away from the ranch forever. He also initiated an aggressive mesquite-clearing program on the ranch. John Spong writes primarily about popular culture. King married Henrietta M. Chamberlain on December 10, 1854 in Brownsville, Texas. By the late eighties Tio was the only member of his generation willing to stay on the ranch. Although the 50,000 tourists to the King Ranch visitors center were still inundated with exhibits on the ranchs great cattle history, the truth was that the cattle division had long ago become one of the smaller profit centers at King Ranch, Inc. The entire village relocated, and these first Kineos helped King get his ranch started. Tio knew how to give his troops one hell of an inspirational speech about the King Ranch. Various Kleberg descendants have made names for themselves in the public sector. Father of Henrietta Maria Atwood; Ella Morse Welton; Richard King, II; Alice Gertrudis Kleberg and Robert E. Lee King, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_King_(Texas). Bob saved the ranch from foreclosure by negotiating a lease with Humble Oil (which later became Exxon) to begin oil and gas exploration on the property. Did you like this post? And he began accumulating more landbuying nearby properties and trading until the ranch eventually totalled 825,000 acres, divided in four parts. Tio says that during his tenure, only one family member ever came, and he was someone who was looking for tips on how to run his own ranch. Sarahs second husband, a Kingsville doctor, also died after the birth of a son, Robert Richard Bobby Shelton. Corpus Christi has a high school named for King. A sense of urgency filled the air. At all ranches, the beef prices keep going down, and the costs of producing the beef keep going up, which means we have to think and act in a more efficient way.. 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. An elderly plumber happened to be on the ranch that morning, driving by the stables just as Tio finished reading his statement. We identified it from obedient source. Our Tio, hes been fired, the plumber cried. King continued expanding his business operations, investing in the Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge Railroad Company, packing plants, ice houses, and harbor improvements at Corpus Christi. If you fill out the first name, last name, or agree to terms fields, you will NOT be added to the newsletter list. Alice Kleberg, daughter of Richard and Henrietta, and her husband, Robert, inherited more than 800,000 acres of the land, and they incorporated that acreage as the King Ranch in 1934. But the drought lasted three years, costing the King Ranch several million dollars in unrecoverable feed costs and pasture leases. To open up more pasture, he invented a plow pulled by a massive, specially designed bulldozer that could clear four acres of brush an hour. During this era, Robert J. Kleberg and Mrs. King continued to improve and diversify the assets of King Ranch with agricultural development, land sales, and town building projects. Dicks cousins B. K. Johnson and Bobby Shelton, half brothers who had worked closely under Bob and Dick, both made a separate presentation at a family board meeting, asking to take over the ranch. This ranching family owns some of the oldest operating ranch land in the country. Thats a lot of baby heifers for one mother cow to nurse, says Helen Groves, one of the family matriarchs. As a teenager in the sixties, Tio worked weekends in the cow camps for 50 cents a day. Finally, Zaleznik stepped to the microphone and presented Tio and Janell with a painting. One day they might be carrying laptop computers in their saddlebags to keep track of the cattle inventory. Management developed ranching operations overseas with land purchases in Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, Venezuela, Spain, and Morocco. Offers may be subject to change without notice. They were refused. He also began breeding the best quarter horse stallion he had at his stables with fifty English Thoroughbred racing mares until he created what he called the perfect cow pony, which seemed to know instinctively how to cull a cow from the herd. You cant do that without fighting climate change. The King Ranch legacy fueling conservationist @jay4txlands land commish run: https://t.co/vQ5fD7anq0. 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. Richard King: Texas Cattle Rancher, William R. Sanford, Carl R. Green, 1997, Enslow Publishers. It was a message he also passed on to his four childrenone of whom was a good-natured boy named Tio, who used to sneak into the Big House to shoot his BB gun at birds that had flown in through the open windows. In 1940, Dick Kleberg, Jr., joined his father, Mr. Dick, and his uncle, Mr. Bob, in managing King Ranch. He focused on getting rid of the businesses that were faltering, such as the companys cotton warehouse in Galveston, a lumberyard in Kingsville, and a horse farm in Kentucky. . Tio Kleberg, had called a Friday-morning staff meeting at the ranch headquarters, just outside Kingsville. Today there are other ranches in the world that take up more territory and produce more beef, but there is no ranch more famous than the King Ranch. Tio was not a saint. I know it happens in other families all the time. Cattle rancher Richard King and wife Henrietta founded the ranch, according to a 1980 Texas Monthly article, and when the latter died in 1925, her heirs split up the ranchs 1.2 million acres. Want to Buy a West Texas Ghost Town? Some thought he had blundered badly during a drought in the late eighties when he decided to lease pastures in North Texas and move much of the ranchs breeding herd there. As predicted, another drought was coming. As Janell said then, Keeping the family and the ranch together is more important than any of us., She turned out to be eerily prescient. By means of this program, King began to transform the hardscrabble longhorns and wild horses of his lands into the finest cattle and horses in Texas. Captain. He became a national celebrity, his exploits featured on the cover of Time. Robert J. Kleberg Jr., president of the King Ranch, Inc., which Owns 960,000 acres of cattle and oil lands in Texas and operates an additional 11.5 million acres of ranches abroad, died Sunday. In 1934, Alice King Kleberg consolidated much of the ranch property into a corporation, with her children as stockholders. After World War II, the ranchs agricultural business was extended, in part to expand the national and global presence of the Santa Gertrudis breed. Copyright 2023 Market Realist. He was keen on creating the infrastructure that would get his product to market in the most efficient way possible. Who could have guessed the day would come when the family would not support the very person who had been so loyal to them?. He thanked them for coming, then he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and said he had a short statement to read. The friend kept hearing the sound of cattle wailing in the background. At a good-bye party for Tio, one old man wept and said, Who will take care of us now? I didn't create it, just shared. Company insiders say the pre-tax profits of King Ranch, Inc., in 1997 were more than $32 million. Richard Louis King Born 10 Jul 1824 in New York City, New York, United States Ancestors Son of Charles Henry King [uncertain] and [mother unknown] He believed the family had an obligation to take care of the Kineos. As the American Civil War progressed, King and Kenedy shipped to and from the Confederate States of America, registering their fleet of 26 boats under Mexican flag at Matamoros to avoid the Union blockade. When she died, he received all of her stock. (832) 681-5700. In 1853, Captain Richard King purchased a creek-fed oasis in the Wild Horse Desert of South Texas, sparking generations of integrity, preservation, and innovation. 2023 National City and Regional Magazine Awards Finalists Announced, Texas Monthly Receives a Nod From the American Bar Association, HBO Max Releases Official Trailer for Love & Death, Step Aside, Perrys: This 30-Ounce Smoked Pork Chop Is Ready to Take the Crown, Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomerys Affair, Willie Nelsons Son Lukas on Ancient Texts, Pearl Jam, and I Never Cared for You, I Biked the I-35 Hell Route From Austin to San Antonio So You Dont Have To, Texas-Style Pulled Pork Is Embarrassing, The Astrodomes Decline From Eighth Wonder to Eighth Blunder of the World, 15 Treasure-Filled Spots to Antique in Small-town Texas, Mosquito Hawks Are Flitting All Over Texas, Matthew McConaughey Is Monetizing His Whole Vibe, Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part II: The Killing of Betty Gore. King Ranch Heirs Family Tree With Complete Detail, Rasputin Family Tree You Will Like These Detail, Carly Phillips Dare Family Tree You Should Check It. The Klebergs, the family that owns the legendary King Ranch in Texas, could be sitting on a billion dollars of land value, according to one estimate. But with the older members of the family retiring and dying, who would guide the company into the next century? They had 5 children, Nettie, Ella, Richard, Alice Gertrude, and Robert E. Lee, the latter named for the King family friend, Robert E. Lee. As soon as King had arrived in Texas, he began speculating in land, beginning with lots in Brownsville, Texas and Cameron County, Texas, and continued investing the large profits from the riverboat firm. He died of stomach cancer at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio on April 14, 1885, at age 60. 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. #7 King Ranch Heirs Own: 911,215 acres in Texas and Florida Henry King ran away from the drudgery of indentured servitude in New York to make his fortune as a steamboat captain. The new clan began to find a world of opportunity beyond the King Ranch gates. Some cowboys said he didnt have a firm handshake and he didnt look a person in the eye. The five children pledged to stay together for twenty years after the incorporation, but since then the descendants of two of them have left the ranch. Tio and I worked well together, he said. 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. He invented the cattle prod to move the cattle along faster when they were in their pens. 3 min read. Around this time, Captain King registered a brand that has since taken on mythic significance in the taming of the West the famous RunningW. The five children pledged to stay together for twenty years. 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. In the 1930s, after years of meticulously crossbreeding Brahmans and Shorthorns, he introduced the dark-red Santa Gertrudis. Most of the Kineos were phased out through an early retirement program.
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