Henrietta King

Henrietta Maria King (née Morse Chamberlain; July 21, 1832 – March 31, 1925) was an American rancher and philanthropist. The wife of entrepreneur Richard King, she and Robert J. Kleberg Jr. managed King Ranch after his death in 1885.

Biography King was born on July 21, 1832, in Boonville, Missouri, to minister Hiram Chamberlain and his wife Maria (née Morse). Her mother died in 1835, and she and her father moved often throughout her childhood. For two years, beginning at age 14, she attended the Holly Springs Female Institute.

King and her father moved to Brownsville, Texas in early 1850. There, she taught at the Rio Grande Female Institute, which her father cofounded with Melinda Rankin. Her father could not find housing and rented a riverboat for them to live in. Her father tied the boat where Richard King dock his freighter. It resulted in conflict, though Richard found romantic interest in Henrietta. It ended with her ending an engagement with a Sunday school teacher and them marrying on December 10, 1854; between 1856 and 1864, they had five children together: Henrietta Maria (1856 – 1917), Ella Morse (1858 – 1900), Nathan Richard (1860 – 1922), Alice Gertrudis (1862 – 1944) and Robert E. Lee (1864 – 1883).

Their family lived in a jacal built of mud and sticks on the King Ranch, which her husband founded in 1852; the jacal was replaced by a house with a view of Santa Gertrudis Creek. While Richard King operated the ranch, she oversaw education and housing of communities living on the ranch. During the American Civil War, the King Ranch was a trade post for cotton. In 1863, Richard King left Henrietta and their children in their house alone, as he fled from Union capture. Henrietta too moved, to San Antonio, after the ranch was robbed by Union forces; they all returned when it became safe. In 2011, she was inducted into the Texas Trail of Fame.