The King Ranch

Lots of RVers winter at the southernmost part of Texas - in either the Brownsville or the McAllen/Mission area. It's warm, inexpensive and developed enough to have all the comforts of home, plus some great outdoors adventures at South San Padre Island or the many birding sanctuaries within the Rio Grande River Valley. We had been playing with the idea of going down there just to check out the area as well as some of the local RV parks for future reference.

Mission is about three hours away from where we are now in Port Aransas, so we decided to make a two day trip of it. We made reservation at a La Quinta Inn in Mission and left early on Thursday, heading south on the main roads in the interest of time.  Our route took us through Kingsville, the home of the King Ranch, a place we had talked about visiting, but it had slipped our minds. So here we had the opportunity to stop and take a look.

This Longhorn was in the greeting party at the Visitors' Center. We learned that Longhorns are basically raised for nostalgic or historical reasons. They have little commercial value as the meat is tough.

He was very friendly and gave my camera a kiss.

The only way to see the King Ranch is to take an 1 1/2 hour van tour around the historic parts of the ranch, which we thought we could squeeze in.  The tour drove us around one relatively small section of their vast local holdings, and our guide told us the story of Richard King, founder of the ranch.  Below you can see the top of the King Ranch home above the treetops. 

At 825,00 acres, or 1,289 square miles, the King Ranch in Texas is one of the largest ranches in the USA, though its property is not contiguous. We got the scoop on how Richard King started out, the development of cattle herds, the working quarter horses and thoroughbred racers, and more stories about his family, employees and some of the original buildings. Richard King developed a breed of cattle by crossing Brahmas with Shorthorns, resulting in a hardy breed well suited for the hot environment in Texas, called the Santa Gerturdis.

It was such a large breed that the meat packers and grocers rejected it because the cuts of meat were too large for their equipment and meat trays.  So he went on to develop a second breed, the Santa Cruz, which was smaller and is still raised today on the ranch. Here you see a few of them with the King Ranch brand, the Running W, on it.

The King Ranch cowboys of today are not like what we imagine based on old movies. They are equipped with a pickup truck, a trailer for their horse, and a cell phone. There are even port-a-potties scattered around the ranch for the cowboys' convenience. Each cowboy is responsible for ten thousand acres. 

King's original cowboys came from a town in Mexico where he bought his first cattle. King basically hired the whole town to come work for him. They and their descendants who still work on the ranch are called Kinenos (with a tilda over the second N). 

It seems that their employees of every stripe lived in Ranch housing (and still do!), making the ranch like a self-sufficient community.  They rose their own sheep and wove distinctive blankets with the King Ranch brand on them.  

The King Ranch brand is known world wide. Even Ford Motors partnered with them to offer a line of King Ranch trucks. Among other things, our tour guide explained to us about brands and shared some stories about the origin of the Running W. Bottom line - no one really knows how King came up with it. 

A few of the older buildings are modeled after The Alamo, like this stable below. 

All that we saw is only a tiny representative and historical portion of the immense King Ranch corporation.  King Ranch not only raises cattle and horses, but they have branched into all kinds of agribusiness, including sugarcane, cotton, milo, citrus, sod, pecans in Texas and in Florida.  They also own a John Deer dealership near Kingsville, a leather goods factory and store, and a publishing house. They have branched out into using their land for hunting and ecotourism. Check out their website for lots more information.

Next we'll tell you about birding in the "Tip-o-Texas."

The River Road: Sugarcane Plantations Then and Now

I may not have mentioned it previously, but we are surrounded on three sides here at Cajun Palms RV Resort by sugarcane. This has made us curious about it, and our latest day trip has answered a lot of our questions. Those of you who are not the slightest bit curious about where your sugar comes from can skip down to the nice pictures of Oak Alley Plantation.

I don't know how it happened, but I'm a farm girl at heart. I was born and raised in New York City and its suburbs. My parents were from out west and we drove across the country often to visit family. Maybe all that farmland we passed in the car just rubbed off on me. As a youngster I used to get up at 5:00 AM to watch The Farm Report on television. God's honest truth. Harvesters and combines with a bowl of cereal before school every morning. 

Rick and I are both pretty interested in agriculture and the manufacturing that happens after the harvest.  Our travels have given us lots of opportunity to learn, but a lot of it is guesswork based on what we're seeing, supplemented by the internet and talking with the locals, so take this all with a grain of salt. I may be a farm girl at heart, but that's the only kind of farm girl I am. 

It's harvest season here, so we're seeing plenty of action. The picture up top is the sugarcane harvest  right in our backyard. Below are the trucks carrying the cut cane to the processing plants. 

Let me backtrack just a bit. As we drive through the countryside here we see sugarcane of two sizes: short and tall.  The explanation seems to be that sugarcane is a two (or three?) year crop. The short, immature crop just gets burned down. When it is ready to be harvested it is about 8 feet tall and dried brown. Harvest happens in December, as does burning, so we're seeing both.

We think we can recognize sugarcane processing plants now. They usually have lots of smoke/steam stacks going full force and huge shed-like structures.  Our day trip took us south of Baton Rouge along Route 405, the River Road, and we saw quite a few sugar plants.  

Here you can see the trucks filled with cane lined up outside of a processing plant.

In this picture you can see what we think is a pile of waste fiber outside of the plant. 

Historically the sugar plantations were established along the Mississippi River, both because of the fertile soil and the easy access to shipping and boat travel along the river.  Below, on this piece of a map, you can see the long skinny plantation properties all along the river on both sides. The whole map, by artist Lisa Middleton, shows all the plantations along the river from Natchez to New Orleans. (We think our guide told us that the green ones are sugarcane.) The plantation we visited is one of the smaller green ones on the west bank. It is now called Oak Alley. 

Sugar was as big a crop here as cotton was in other parts of the south. It really built this part of the country. Like all southern plantations, these were dependent upon slave labor.  When visiting Oak Alley, the first buildings you see are reconstructed slave cabins. Inside the cabins there are exhibits of typical furnishings as well as information about the slave trade and the nature of the slaves' lives on the plantation.

We were guided through the main house by a young man dressed in period clothing. 

The house is three stories high, with at least four large rooms and a central hall on each floor.  It is furnished as you might expect a wealthy antebellum home to be. Like in Gone With the Wind. All the guides are dressed in period clothing.

The house is surrounded by three hundred year old live oaks. 

Around here they are the signature of the landscape. 

This is the million dollar view that the plantation was named for:  

We were the only people walking along this allee (that's French). We felt so privileged to be there, and grateful that some of these places have been preserved and are open to the public. We know there are many plantations in the south, but we really haven't been visiting them. Some in the area are still private homes and farms, and some have been turned into inns with spas and restaurants. Many are long gone.

We saw other kinds of manufacturing plants on our drive as well.  This one was CF Industry's nitrogen plant.  (Don't ask - I don't know.) Among other things, it makes the urea based DEF fluid that we use in our truck.

We could tell that some of them were oil refineries and petroleum or gas related plants because of the huge storage tanks…

 

… and the pipes going across the road, over the levee and out to the tanker ships on the river. Before now we never really understood the extent of the levee system along the Mississippi and its tributaries. We started seeing the levees in Memphis, and since then we rarely actually see the river because of the levees on both sides. The Mississippi Delta has a long history of flooding of course and the levees have been around in some form for centuries. 

We saw the last agricultural behemoth of the day as we sat in a traffic jam outside of Baton Rouge and watched the full moon come up.  This one looks like it might be a grain elevator. What do you think?

Next post, I'll be getting back to nature.

Nashville, TN: Agricultural Life Then and Now

The fall harvest is still going strong here in Nashville, as we discovered at the Farmers Market downtown with Nick and Cindy, our friends who we met last winter at The Great Outdoors, in Florida. Cindy and I enjoyed looking at the turnip greens, four kinds of kale, summer squash, tomatoes, cauliflower, eggplant, and winter squash. The market here has a section that is just for the real farmers, and it was full of fruits, veggies, smoked hams and canned goods at unbeatable prices.  I picked up some tomatoes and kale.

I think they were also selling some produce from way out of town in some cases, but most was local. It gave us a sense of what the local farming scene is like. We haven't been out in the county too much around here, and haven't seen what's being raised. Some horses, some cattle, no crops to speak of.

There was another section with a well stocked international grocery store and a few restaurants and vendors selling baked goods. We couldn't resist the cinnamon buns ... so, next morning, after the cinnamon buns, the four of us loaded up in our GMC truck (usually reserved for towing the DRV) and drove to The Hermitage, home and plantation of Andrew Jackson, aka "Old Hickory."

After the basic admission price of $19 ($16 for seniors) an outstanding audio self-guided tour is provided at no extra cost.  The combination of the audio tour and the informative displays throughout the museum, grounds and mansion (above) taught us a great deal about Jackson, our seventh president. Rick and I had forgotten most of what we might have ever known about him. We even had Old Hickory confused with Stonewall Jackson, the great Civil War confederate general. Ignorant northerners. 

The audio tour also had optional tracks to learn about The Hermitage and Andrew Jackson through the life of his wife, Rachel. Cindy and I found that especially interesting. Andrew and Rachel Jackson are buried in the tomb next to the house (below). Their last living slave, Albert, in buried right next to the tomb.

The Hermitage website is also very informative about Jackson and The Hermitage. Jackson was a general, politician, president and a farmer. The Hermitage was primarily a cotton plantation, although they raised animals and produce for their own consumption. The Hermitage maintains a small patch of cotton on the grounds so that visitors can see what cotton looks like. There were still a few bolls on the plants that were mostly dead from a recent frost. 

 Jackson owned hundreds of slaves, and the Hermitage does an excellent job of relating the circumstances of their lives and their significance to the plantation. It was strange to hear the tape talking about Jackson buying and selling people. One track of the audio tape was especially moving. It was nothing but the recitation of the names of Jackson's slaves and it went on and on and on...

 These are two reconstructed slave cabins. 

On the grounds is a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle. The herd was completed unfazed by my approach to their two tiny calves. I guess they're pretty used to company. Galloways are a shaggy kind of cattle, as you can see on this little guy.

Live tour guides are ready in the mansion to lead you through the rooms and answer any questions.  I'd say the home fell somewhere between Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon in terms of style and grandeur. There were no photos allowed inside, but the kitchen was actually out back. You can see how modest it is by modern standards.

There was also a horse and wagon tour available, but we passed on that. 

It was a beautiful day and we were happy to walk around on our own steam.

We were all pretty impressed with the quality of the Hermitage and the depth of information about Jackson and his plantation that was easily accessible in one visit.  Ours lasted about three hours and we were ready for a late lunch. We stopped at McNamara's, the "world's best Irish pub outside of Ireland." 

We had a nice pot of tea and some corned beef reuben sandwiches.

Well, we're leaving Nashville tomorrow and I hope to squeeze in one more post before we got. 

Then on the Memphis and Graceland! 

Agri-Bliss in the Berkshires

So here we are in the beautiful Berkshires of Massachusetts, house sitting for our friends Wendy and Steve, in temperatures hitting the humid mid nineties with no AC! Holy Cow. In the past two years we haven't had to deal with heat like this, and the few days we did, we had air conditioning to get us through the night. So now, after rain for three weeks in NH, we are having a heat wave, which does happen now and again in New England. The good news is, our friends have a lovely screen porch with a bed on it, so we can sleep virtually outside in the cooler night air. Boy are we spoiled. 

The RV has been parked in the yard here for over three weeks. Seems to be happy just sitting there, and not bothered by the heat.

 

I'm having a great time garden sitting as well. I'm assigned to pick whatever is ready while we're here, plus I'm on Japanese beetle patrol. Every morning and evening I capture the rascals and send them on to bug heaven. They seem to like the raspberry bushes the best, then the willow bushes. Our friend Wendy is a basket weaver and she grows her own varieties of willow for the baskets. 

Here's what the willow looks like after its harvested and bundled.

The J beetles really go for one particular kind of willow, but I'm going my level best to keep them off. They're persistent little "bug"gers, and in just 12 hours from morning to evening, there's another batch after those tender willow leaves. It's a humbling enterprise.

Despite the hard work ; ) we are also managing to get out and do a few things for fun. We hit the Berkshire Botanical Gardens in Stockbridge one day. They have a lovely children's garden and a farm camp! Boy I would have loved to go to a farm camp when I was a kid. (Wait a minute, I am at a farm camp!)

Although this is an incredibly busy picture, perhaps you can make out the beautiful raised beds with specimen veggie plants in them. Everything looked lushly vibrant.

There were sculptures placed around the gardens, but I wasn't crazy about them in general. They do provide nice focal points for some pictures though.

And here's one of nature's own little focal points on a black-eyed susan.

There is also a collection of structures that all seem to be variations on the garden shed theme. Martha Stewart sponsored one, and it looks perfectly simple, just like you'd imagine. This one looks like it belongs in Cades Cove, TN.

Another morning I set out early to take some pictures and ended up at Gould Farm, where the gardens are tended by some very vigilant gardeners. 

I see them out there every time we pass by!  : )

Meanwhile, back at the house, I've taken some photos of the tools of the trade wielded on a daily basis by Wendy and Steve. Here are some intimate shots of those to finish up this post. 

Perhaps you have some of these in your home too?

When next I write, it will probably be from Brattleboro, VT. We'll see you there.