Texas Now Magazine Presenting the "Texas Coast Experience" | Page 32

Discover the Kenedy Family
by visiting the Kenedy Ranch
Museum of South Texas.
The story of the Kenedy Family begins with the birth of Dona Petra
Vela de Vidal in 1823. Having sailed from Catalonia, Spain to the
New World, six generations of the Vela family had been ranchers in
northern Mexico. Her father was a provincial governor under Spain
with jurisdiction over the territory lying between the Nueces River
and the Rio Grande and over the Indian tribes within. Petra was
one of the few Mexican-origin upper-class women in
nineteenth-century Texas. Representing
a vital link to the landed families in
Brownsville, she marries Mifflin Kenedy,
a steamboat captain who had arrived in
Texas during the Mexican War.
B o r n i n 1 8 1 8 , i n C h e s t e r C o u n t y,
Pennsylvania, Mifflin’s parents were
Quakers, and he was educated in the common
schools of the county, spending some time
in a boarding school headed by a Quaker
educator. Kenedy taught school during the
winter before his sixteenth birthday, and in
the spring of 1834, he sailed as a cabin boy on
the Star of Philadelphia, bound for Calcutta,

22