Benjamin Dudley Tarlton Dougherty

Dougherty's best-known contest was the 1954 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. A state representative from Beeville, he challenged the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, and lost, 883,264 votes to 354,188, which was 28.6 percent of the ballots. Johnson went on to win the November general election with about 85 percent. The LBJ Library describes Dougherty simply as a South Texas businessman, a member of the Texas House and Johnson's opponent in 1954. His Army service, ranch and newspaper are on the plaque; the race is where his name crossed the state.

What the plaque says

Benjamin Dudley Tarlton Dougherty 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. His legacy continues through the Dudley T. Dougherty foundation, established in 2000. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — 26 mi
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Presidio La Bahía — 26 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 26 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Normanna — steps away
• Early Trails in Bee County — 2.1 mi
• Captain A.C. Jones — 2.1 mi
• Tuleta — 3.6 mi