The Tale of King Ranch

Richard King didn’t start out as a cattleman, he drove boats.

Born in 1824, King was a steamboat captain before setting sail for the Wild Horse Desert in south Texas where he established his first ranch, a modest spread of 15,000 acres. He didn’t stop there and by the 1940s his heir’s operations included one in Chester County, and by the 1970s his holdings were made up of 11.5 million acres around the world.

King’s legacy began in the 1850s when Texas land was plentiful and cheap. The parcel that King fell in love with was a spring-fed haven along the Santa Gertrudis Creek with large mesquite trees providing ample and necessary shade. Once he laid eyes on that piece of land, King envisioned raising cattle to sell to the markets.

King got his sea-legs at the age of eleven when he stowed away on a schooner out of New York City to escape the jeweler to whom he had been indentured by his penniless parents. King proved his mettle as a seaman and soon attained a pilot’s rating.

When King found his first property, he was just twenty-three years old and running a small operation hauling freight up and down the Rio Grande River. His riverboat days were lucrative enough that he was able to purchase his land with business partner Gideon “Legs” Lewis in 1853. King married and, after the Civil War,  grew his ranch to 146,600 acres.

King didn’t think small. He organized the first cattle drive which enabled him to expand his beef business into other states. By the time King died in 1885, King Ranch was known as the birthplace of the American ranching industry.

After his death, King’s lawyer Robert Kleberg worked with King’s widow to help run the ranch and later married King’s youngest daughter.

It was Kleberg who started new breeding programs and designed the first cattle-dipping vat to combat the Texas Fever tick. By the 1970s King Ranch encompassed land from West Texas, to Pennsylvania to Morocco.

Brandywine Conservancy’s preservation of the King Ranch is the largest conservation easement established to date in Pennsylvania.

In Chester County, King Ranch operated as Buck and Doe Run Valley Farms. Texas longhorn cattle were shipped here by railroad from various locations throughout the country and maintained in feed lots before being delivered to cattle markets.

In 1984 the Brandywine Conservancy formed a limited partnership with a group of conservation-minded investors to protect 5,367 acres of the King Ranch property in Chester County. The partnership placed  4,596-acres under permanent conservation easement, severely restricting construction. The remaining 771 acres, known as the Laurels Preserve and considered the most environmentally sensitive, was donated to the Conservancy as a nature preserve.  The Conservancy later granted a conservation easement protecting the Laurels to other land trust.

Brandywine Conservancy’s preservation of the King Ranch is the largest conservation easement established to date in Pennsylvania. It is also considered one of the most important and sizeable conservation projects in the eastern United States.

Sources: king-ranch.com, brandywineconservancy.org