Bonnie Harkey owned the walnut farm and had given 94 acres of it to a grandson, Carl Wade Pressley. The Harkey family owns hundreds of acres of walnut farmland in Central Texas. Family members have fought a long battle in court over who would inherit those lands after the death of Bonnie Harkey. Bruce Harkey, 59, said in interviews with The Associated Press before his arrest that he had long ago reached an agreement to buy part of Pressley's estate.
It's not clear if that agreement could be legally enforced. By 1956, Leonard Bend Pecan Farm had 3,300 acres of orchards on the peninsula and had become the largest contiguous walnut orchard in Texas and the second largest in the United States. And several years later, when their son planted 2,000 acres of walnuts in Australia, the Stahmanns became the world's largest walnut producing family.
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