Beeville, Bee County
Benjamin Dudley Tarlton Dougherty (1923-1978) was born to James Robert and Genevieve Tarlton Dougherty of Beeville, where his father practiced law. Known as Dudley, he lived in Beeville his entire life. Dougherty enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943. He later served under General Patton’s Third Army, receiving four bronze stars for active combat in Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland and Central Europe. Returning to civilian life, in 1950 he married Mary Patricia Calhoun of Charco. The couple founded San Domingo ranch on Medio Creek, raising four children. Post-war, while fighting for peace, Dougherty actively opposed forced repatriation of European civilians to totalitarian regimes, and later, Koreans to North Korea. In Bee county, he supported civic and local causes, donating land for the construction of American Legion Post 818 in Beeville for African Americans. Elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1951, the Honorable Dudley Dougherty served his term. In 1954, he opposed Lyndon Baines Johnson in the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate. Simultaneously, Dougherty embraced environmental issues and water conservation reform in 1954, authoring The Water Problem – a Solution. Dougherty began publishing a bilingual Texas newspaper in 1959. In 1961, he was a principal among the Texas newspaper editors who met with President Kennedy at the White House, representing San Antonio’s Spanish/English newspaper La Prensa. The Hon. Dudley T. Dougherty remained active in political discourse, while ranching and supporting key changes in oil and gas production. His efforts resulted in landowners’ more equitable development of their minerals. Dougherty received an honorary doctorate from Mary Hardin-Baylor in 1974 for his “lasting contributions to humanity.” His legacy continues through the Dudley T. Dougherty foundation, established in 2000.