Sherwin Alumina Company, located near Gregory, Texas, was originally part of an 1880 fifty-year charter held by the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company with land holdings of 164,415 acres. The Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company included such major stockholders as Joseph F. Green, David Sinton and Charles Phelps Taft, half brother of William Howard Taft. In 1908, the company was fostering the sale of land for farming when William Howard Taft received the Republican nomination for the presidency. From that moment on, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company was referred to as "The Taft Ranch."
A three-story mansion was erected on a bluff facing Corpus Christi Bay to house visiting stockholders and guests of the ranch. The residence became known as La Quinta, Spanish for "country house."
On March 22, 1951, twenty-one years after "The Taft Ranch" was discovered, a deed was recorded in the San Patricio County Courthouse for the purchase by Reynolds Metals Company of approximately 1600 acres of the Joseph F. Green Estate, formerly a portion of "The Taft Ranch."
In May of 2007 Sherwin Alumina was acquired by a subsidiary of Glencore International AG. Glencore is a privately held company headquartered out of Baar, Switzerland that employs well over 2000 people world wide.
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