Home » Travel » Texan Cities » Visiting the Fabled King Ranch

Visiting the Fabled King Ranch

© Bob Thaxton

Throughout the world, there are two things that top the list of what Texas is known for – oil wells and ranches. Many of those who visit the state will want to see an oil well and a ranch that they can tell the folks back home about, and there are many places where they can do just that. But the most famous of them is the fabled King Ranch in South Texas.

A few decades ago, tours of the King Ranch were available only to invited guests. Others had to content themselves with glimpses from nearby highways. Nowadays, the ranch is open to a variety of tours seven days a week year round. If you’re in the vicinity, set aside some time for a stop in Kingsville and a visit to the ranch. This makes an excellent day trip during a vacation in Corpus Christi or San Antonio, and if you’re driving to the Rio Grande Valley, it’s a memorable way to take a break from the monotony of the highway.

The ranch’s history dates back to 1852 when Captain Richard King was traveling from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and stopped to camp on the banks of Santa Gertrudis Creek. Born to poor Irish parents in New York City, King at age 10 stowed away on a ship bound for Mobile, Alabama, and within a few years, he had worked his way up from cabin boy to the pilot of steamboats sailing up and down rivers in Alabama and Florida. While in Florida, he met Mifflin Kenedy who was to become a lifelong friend, mentor and business partner. During the U.S.-Mexican War in the late 1840s, he and Kenedy operated boats transporting troops and supplies up the Rio Grande. After the war, they stayed on the border and were among entrepreneurs who developed the city of Brownsville. For more than two decades, their companies, M. Kenedy and Co. (1850-66) and King, Kenedy and Co. (1866-74), dominated trade along the river.

King and a partner, Gideon K. “Legs” Lewis, in 1852 set up a cow camp near where King had stopped along Santa Gertrudis Creek. The next year they bought a 15,500-acre Spanish land grant, Rincon de Santa Gertrudis, and the King Ranch dates its founding from that purchase in 1853. They soon added a 53,000-acre tract, the Garza Santa Gertrudis grant, and this wasn’t the end of their acquisitions of land. They continued to add other tracts until Lewis died in 1855. Then King, along with other partners, bought Lewis’s share, and the ranch continued to grow. From 1860-68, Mifflin Kenedy was a partner. Even after their ranching partnership was dissolved, King and Kenedy continued to operate the steamboat company which helped smuggle cotton out of the South during the Civil War. After the war, thousands of head of cattle raised by King, Kenedy and others were driven up the trail to Kansas, and the King Ranch became larger and larger.