In one regard, what happened to Tio Kleberg was nothing more than pure corporate politics, a clash between two executives. The now eighty or so family stockholders split an estimated $27 million in oil royalties in 1997 plus another $9 million in dividends from the King Ranch corporation itself. 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. Want to Buy a West Texas Ghost Town? At least initially, Hunt did act more like an asset manager than a visionary. From left to right in the picture, the Kleberg children are: Alice, who is the only survivor of the five and perhaps the most fiercely independent of the bunch. Since the death of Captain King, the ranch has been run by an in-law (Robert Kleberg, Sr.) in the second generation, a younger brother (Bob Kleberg) in the third, and an in-law (Jim Clement) in the fourth. The jeweler was a difficult man, and the boy was chafing under the man's mistreatment. But they are not sure how long they will stay. We identified it from obedient source. The Kleberg family, descended from Richard King, held sway over the family's holdings from an austere whitewashed mansion on the ranch. Since his death in 1885, there has always been a family member in charge of. This era also launched the famed King Ranch horse legacy. Richard Louis King (1824-1885) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree Richard Louis King (1824 - 1885) Capt. 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. Taylor Prewitt is the newsletter editor for Texas Monthly. 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. We have our opinions on what can make King Ranch better. 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. He never presented any vision of what he wanted King Ranch to become. 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. Robert J. Kleberg designed the first cattle dipping vats to battle the tick. [1] From 1842 to 1847, King would operate steamboats on the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers, in Florida and Georgia.[1]. We had different ideas on certain aspects of the cattle operation, but he adopted some of my ideas and I agreed with some of his.. Nor is there any guarantee that Tio will last on the board past his one-year term. 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. (One of his papers in the journal Psychiatryis titled, The Case for Not Interpreting Unconscious Mental Life in Consulting to Organizations.) The first outside chief executive and president of the King Ranch was Darwin E. Smith, the head of Kimberly-Clark, the Dallas tissue paper and baby-products corporation. Zaleznik asked the couple to come to the front of the room, and as they did the entire family stood and applauded. 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. There are no more cow camps (everyone drives back to his home in a pickup at the end of the day), no more chuck wagons (the cowboys bring their own sack lunches to work), and no more wood-burning fires to heat the famed Running W branding irons (the cowboys now plug their branding irons into electrical outlets). After Bobs death, the sixty or so family stockholders decided they should get a larger share of that moneymuch larger. John Spong writes primarily about popular culture. Apartment in Megve, Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes, France Contact. The article hinted at the challenges to come, but Tio and others in the family seemed full of hope that the family tradition would endure. Young Tio was given the responsibilities for the cattle operations, in large part because no one else in the family was willing to take them on. I have a very high regard for him. A Ranching Family John Spong writes primarily about popular culture. Because some of the more influential family members believed that the King Ranch could use even better leadership, Smith and then Jarvis resigned under pressure, Smith after one year and Jarvis after five. Besides, Tio was willing to take on any responsibility for the company. Since his death in 1885, there has always been a family member in charge of the home ranches, the four massive divisions of land in South Texas. The entire village relocated, and these first Kineos helped King get his ranch started. Many members of the older generation were worried what the infusion of money would do to the family. 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. 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. He also said that they repeatedly told him how excited they were about having him bring his skills to the board of directors. Copyright 2023 King Ranch. An index to over 2.1 million people mentioned in Associated Press stories, including name, subject, location, date and a reference to the article. 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. The King Ranch continues to be a dominant economic force in the region. This family tree def has some flaws. 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. The Texas Fever Tick created significant problems for the marketing of cattle from South Texas. Always hungry for more land, Mr. Bob, as he became known among the Kineos, used the King Ranchs share of the oil royalties to buy huge amounts of land in Australia, Cuba, Europe, and South America, creating a worldwide cattle kingdom. Alexander was the sole grandson of Bob Kleberg, Jr., the man who perhaps more than anyone had insisted on home rule. (A single summer drought could cost the ranch up to $3 million.) King Ranch Descendants Named to List of Biggest Landowners in U.S. Husband of Henrietta Maria Morse King Their holdings outside New Mexico include the Peachtree and Top ranches in John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley. The cotton and milo farms, which had been expanded to 60,000 acres, brought in at least half a million dollars more than the cattle. r/YellowstonePN on Reddit: Dutton Family Tree Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion? But what impressed many family members was that he had also been trained at Harvard Business School, focusing on agribusiness. All Rights Reserved. He died of stomach cancer at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio on April 14, 1885, at age 60. 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. Market Realist is a registered trademark. Under his management, the King Ranch became the greatest beef-producing operation in the United States. Today neither is with the ranch. He would lose his temper at meetings when he thought the family committee was losing its focus, and his straightforward manner occasionally offended relatives. 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. Dottie and Ed: A Love Story Mixed Up in Time, 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, 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. Were he alive today, Richard King would hardly recognize the . Lee is said to have chosen the location for the King's home on the King ranch, as a location easy to defend. The new leaders of the King Ranch decided to keep the family together by turning their backs on Tio, one of the few remaining heirs who still believed there was more to the ranch than its wealth. As a teenager in the sixties, Tio worked weekends in the cow camps for 50 cents a day. (Another fifth-generation family member, Martin Clement, who lived in Kingsville, supervised the Big House, which was used as a lodge for visiting family members and special guests.) It was during these transitional years that King Ranch made its name in animal husbandry. A West Texas Roundup, Without All That Hoopin and Hollerin, Texans, Meet Your Adorable, Bloodthirsty New Neighbors. As part of the deal, Humble gave him a $3.5 million loan, which took care of the tax. Tio believed, says Leroy G. Denman, Jr., who was the ranch attorney for almost fifty years, that anybody who works for King Ranch ought to work like he does, which is from four a.m. until midnight, seven days a week, and that if you dont have that kind of dedication, you dont have any business here., In fact, considering how much work there was to be done that Friday, Tios 21-member staff was perplexed that he would call a meeting. 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. Hunt had spent some of his youth in Texas and had worked as an executive for a large family-owned ranching company in the Panhandle. There were other family members who believed that Tio had wasted King Ranch money on the introduction of the Santa Cruz; privately they said he was trying to draw attention to himself. 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. Another became a champion equestrian rider in Florida. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Together, they initiated a series of innovations that kept King Ranch successful and at the leading edge of the ranching industry. Christian Wallace writes about West Texas, oil and gas, music, cowboys, history, and history-making Texans. Emily McCullar is a senior editor covering pop culture, news, and Texas history. The family had a long history of fights over money, going back to Johnson's own lawsuit against other King Ranch heirs after he sold his stake for $70 million. As predicted, another drought was coming. One of Captain Kings most important contributions to his ranchs improvement was the outworking of his vision to improve his cattle and horse stock through an aggressive, thorough and studied upbreeding (breed improvement) program. 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 . 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. Richard, the oldest child, was a man of natural ability and grace, the favorite of his mother. He traveled to an impoverished hamlet in Mexico where many vaqueros were known to live. But around the ranch headquarters and in Kingsville, the real story was spreading like a prairie fire. 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. Texas Monthly Is Nominated for Two 2023 Media Awards by the James Beard Foundation. #7 King Ranch Heirs 911,215 acres He and the managers introduced a new composite breed called the Santa Cruz, which some experts said was leaner and more fertile than the Santa Gertrudis and which Tio himself claimed would one day become the dominant breed on the ranch. 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. 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. Tio knew how to give his troops one hell of an inspirational speech about the King Ranch. When Henrietta King died in 1925, the ranchs 1.2 million acres were divided among her heirs. Her first husband, a cowboy, died shortly after the birth of their only child, Belton Kleberg B Johnson. In 1853 and 1854 King began land acquisitions in the region of the creek, purchasing valid titles to two ranches of a combined 68,500 acres (277 km2), forming the nucleus of the King Ranch. Luxury Homes for Sale in Albertville, Auvergne Rhne Alpes, France Soon after the 1925 death of Bobs grandmother, Henrietta King, the barely profitable ranch was saddled with a $3 million inheritance tax. Now 87, she and her children run a former division of the King Ranch called the Santa Fe Ranch, in Hidalgo County. 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). In 1934, Alice King Kleberg consolidated much of the ranch property into a corporation, with her children as stockholders. 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). 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. The new group of leaders insists that the King Ranch legacy will not dieand perhaps it wont. Whether that is the right thing for the company or for the shareholders is another issue.. But now all he could do was stand with his painting, smiling graciously with his wife, listening to the applause go on and on. 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. Those who came up later and gave the painting a second look said nothing out loud, but it was clear that the landscape could not possibly have been South Texas. Move em out: Despite 60,000 head of cattle, the corporations profits these days depend on ventures far removed from ranching. These efforts paid off as Mr. Kleberg brought in a gusher of a water well in 1899, and then another and another discovering a river of water running under the drought-prone rangelands. He is also linked to several filibustering exhibitions in northern Mexico, attempts to seize Mexican territory by force. To eliminate at least part of the tax, Bob could simply have sold off some of the land. It was good politics to avoid butting heads with the last Kleberg on the ranch. Most of the Kineos were phased out through an early retirement program. King Ranch Heirs Family Tree With Complete Detail Richard King and his heirs rooted out a place for themselves, bent it to their will, and then triumphed beyond their wildest dreams, building an empire like nothing the world had ever seen. One employee openly worried about major job cutbacks after allegedly overhearing Hunt say he had learned to run the ranching division at Tejon with just a couple of cowboys and some dogs. Although six of the board members came from outside the family, two were younger cousins of TiosJohn D. Alexander, Jr., of San Antonio and James H. Jamey Clement, Jr., of Dallas, both private investors in their early forties. King Ranch claims not only a large piece of Texas history but the cattle history as well. He believed the family had an obligation to take care of the Kineos. 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. Tio was in a denim jacket and Janell in a windbreaker. Todays King Ranch is a major agribusiness with interests in cattle ranching, farming (citrus, cotton, grain, sugar cane, and turfgrass), luxury retail goods, and recreational hunting. Heres more about the property. But he kept me and the ranch managers in the dark like a bunch of mushrooms. . A couple hundred miles away, at the King Ranch corporate offices on the twenty-third floor of a downtown Houston skyscraper, a press release was being issued that said Tio and Janell have decided it is in the best interest of King Ranch to leave day-to-day operations. The press release reported that Tio would continue to serve the ranch as a new member of the board of directors. Yet during the twice-yearly roundups, time seems to stand still. His interest would also light on a lovely young lady in the King household the captains youngest daughter, Alice Gertrudis King. Its little wonder that the Ford Motor Company licenses the King Ranch name for upscale variants of its F-Series trucks. Taylor Prewitt is the newsletter editor for Texas Monthly. Richard stowed away on a steamboat bound for Mobile, Alabama. Please enable JavaScript in your browser's settings to use this part of Geni. Tio said he knew the ranch from top to bottom, and he could show anyone the places where there might be problems, such as a garbage dump or an underground storage tank. Nows Your Chance. How, on a ranch where the bonds of family meant so much, could its most loyal son be deposed? One morning the cowboys looked up and saw Tio riding toward them on his horse. She . (832) 681-5700. Clement had grown up with Tio on the ranch during the sixties, when Clements father was helping run the ranchs corporate affairs. Arrondissement of Albertville Genealogy Resources & Vital Records 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. He gave personal loans to the Kineos, took their kids to the doctor, and worked every day of the week. Those experiences taught Jay the value of hard work and land stewardship, he said. One time she wrote about sports. In 1860, King and Kenedy jointly purchased a large ranch, Santa Gertrudis, jointly managing livestock, as R. King and Company. 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 continued acquiring land until his death in 1885, when the ranch had 614,000 acres (2,480 km2). If the dividends were going to remain high in the future, the King Ranch had no choice but to reposition itself and diversify its businesses. 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. Their descendants have followed a similar pattern: the men run the ranch, the women keep the family together. But so far, they have not gotten off to an auspicious start capturing the spirit of the place. And he was a quiet, modest man who never questioned his role as the supporting player to his uncle Bob. Albertville, Savoie, Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes, France - HiSoUR Times were changing, and the board declared that the ranch no longer needed a domineering Bob Kleberglike leader. There was a long, embarrassed silence around the table. A few weeks later, Wright died suddenly of a heart attack. In this job youre always going to do something that will piss off someone in the family. The 10 Biggest Ranches In The Entire State Of Texas They had 5 children, Nettie, Ella, Richard, Alice Gertrude, and Robert E. Lee, the latter named for the King family friend, Robert E. Lee. He seemed unusually serious when he and his wife, Janell, arrived outside the stables, where he had asked everyone to gather. In 1836, King Charles-Albert gave birth to Albertville by uniting the two towns (Conflans and the Hospital). Captain Richard King Family Tree View Complete Tree Sarah, who grew up a tomboy and wanted only to ranch. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Sugdens mother was Mary Etta Kleberg, the daughter of one of the original five Kleberg children. the whiskey is 105 proof and made from the ranch's invasive mesquite trees . 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. He attended Texas Tech University, married his college sweetheart, an art history major named Janell Gerald, and briefly flirted with the idea of making the Army his career. Dick had a bright future as a lawyerhe had done well in his first year at the University of Texas School of Lawbut he wanted to return home and serve his family. BibliographyCaptain King of Texas: The man who made the King Ranch, Tom Lea, 1957, Atlantic Monthly Press. Another owned a contemporary art gallery in San Antonio. 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.
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