Monday, September 29, 2008

Lasater ranch has history Standard-Times: How did your family get into ranching? Laurie Lasater: My grandfather, Edward C. Lasater, founded the South Texas town of Falfurrias when establishing his ranch there in 1890. His ranch grew to 350,000 acres, but the family was forced to sell most of the land following his death in 1930 due to the Depression and mounting debt against the property. Among the assets salvaged were the remnants of my grandfather's upgraded Brahman herd and the remains of his 20,000 purebred Hereford cows. Dad withdrew from Princeton in the middle of his sophomore year in 1931 to come home and help hold things together. His mother and uncle sold him the cattle on credit, and by 1940 he had paid for them. The Beefmaster breed is the result of Tom Lasater experimenting with various combinations of three breeds - Hereford, Shorthorn, Brahman. He quickly discovered that the three-way cross was superior to any other combination and converted his entire herd to that cross. Beefmasters were recognized as a breed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture in 1954. On the other side of the family, my maternal great-grandmother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, was a member of the pioneer ranch legacy families of J. A. Matthews and George Reynolds, who settled Shackelford and Throckmorton counties. My great-uncle was Watt Matthews, managing partner of the Lambshead Ranch near Albany....

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