Kleberg County Texas map
27.44° N · 97.66° W · County seat: Kingsville · 1,090 sq mi
Kleberg County was carved out of the King Ranch, and the ranch headquarters is still inside it, two miles west of Kingsville. The county runs from the ranch pastures east across the Laguna Madre to the Gulf beach on Padre Island, and 25,368 of its 31,040 people live in the one city.
Kingsville sits on US-77 in the middle of the county. Baffin Bay is the notch in the south shoreline; the barrier island on the right of the map is Padre Island.
Where Kleberg County is
The county was organized in 1913 from the southern part of Nueces County and named for Robert Justus Kleberg, a German immigrant who fought at San Jacinto and whose descendants married into the King family and ran the ranch. Nueces County is north, Kenedy County south across Baffin Bay, Brooks County southwest and Jim Wells County west.
Corpus Christi is about 30 miles northeast — Kingsville is part of its metropolitan area — and Harlingen is 86 miles south down US-77. Roughly a fifth of the county's area is water: the Laguna Madre, Baffin Bay and the Cayo del Grullo and Alazan Bay arms that reach inland behind it.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Kingsville (county seat) | City — the only incorporated place | 25,368 |
Ricardo and Riviera, both on US-77 south of Kingsville, and Loyola Beach and Riviera Beach on Baffin Bay are unincorporated. Everything west of the highway is ranch.
Roads
- US-77 – the north–south trunk, entering from Driscoll in Nueces County, passing through Kingsville, Ricardo and Riviera and leaving south for Sarita and the Rio Grande Valley.
- Interstate 69E – under construction along the US-77 corridor; the Kingsville bypass sections are being brought to interstate standard.
- SH-141 – west from Kingsville toward Alice and US-281.
- SH-285 – southwest from Riviera to Falfurrias and on to Hebbronville.
- FM-771 and FM-628 – the routes east toward Loyola Beach and the Laguna Madre shore.
- Park Road 22 – reaches the Padre Island National Seashore entrance from the Nueces County side; the seashore itself continues south into Kleberg County along the island.
The King Ranch
Richard King, a steamboat captain on the Rio Grande, bought the Santa Gertrudis land grant in 1853 and built from it one of the largest ranches in the United States — about 825,000 acres today, spread across Kleberg, Kenedy, Brooks and Willacy counties in four divisions. The Santa Gertrudis headquarters division lies immediately west of Kingsville, and the main house and working pens are on it.
The ranch bred the Santa Gertrudis, a Shorthorn–Brahman cross recognised in 1940 as the first beef breed developed in the United States, and it ran a quarter horse and thoroughbred program alongside the cattle. The King Ranch Museum and the King Ranch Saddle Shop are downtown in Kingsville, in old commercial buildings, and the ranch runs bus tours from a visitor centre on SH-141.
Kingsville exists because of the ranch: Henrietta King and her son-in-law Robert Kleberg brought the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway through in 1904 and laid out the town beside it.
The university and the air station
Texas A&M University–Kingsville opened in 1925 as South Texas State Teachers College and spent most of the century as Texas A&I before joining the A&M System in 1989. It has around 6,000 students, a wildlife research institute working on South Texas rangeland, and an engineering school; the Javelina football program is the campus's best-known export.
Naval Air Station Kingsville, southeast of town, is one of the Navy's two jet training bases. Student aviators fly the T-45 Goshawk from it, and the noise of the training pattern is a constant over the county. The base, the university, the ranch and the school district are the county's largest employers.