Kicaster Community

Kicaster's name began as a creek's. Local historians trace it to cacaxtli, an Aztec word for a carrying frame, borrowed for the watersheds east of San Antonio, which Spanish mission ranches had grazed. Before the post office, neighbors called themselves the Union School community, after the 1872 school, which served a wide district until it was taken down in the 1940s. The New Sulphur Springs Road, opened in the late 1870s, cut about three miles off the trip to San Antonio. Silesian Polish families from nearby St. Hedwig began buying land here in the late 1800s.

What the plaque says

Kicaster Community The families of Isaac Crow, R. T. Spivey, Dr. W. R. Callaway, T. P. Camp, J. E. Watkins, Isom Ferguson, L. B. Pittman, and others began a farming settlement here in the 1860s. John James donated land for a schoolhouse (1872), where church services were also held. A. C. and Mary Anderson in 1887 gave more land for public use. Easterling post office, opened in 1887, was soon renamed Kicaster for nearby creek, but closed in 1906. The school was phased out in 1940, and the churches moved away. Kicaster Cemetery, in use since the 1870s, now marks the site of the community. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 15 mi
  The southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
• Mission San Juan — 15 mi
  The mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.
• San Antonio Missions National Historical Park — 17 mi
  Four working parish churches on the Mission Trail south of downtown, with the visitor center at Mission San Jose, the Queen of the Missions, and the descendants who still worship there.
• Mission Concepción — 18 mi
  A stone church dedicated in 1755 that has never fallen into ruin, its convento ceilings still painted, and the ground where the Texas Revolution's fight for San Antonio began.

More markers nearby

• Applewhite Homestead — 5.9 mi
• Suttles Pottery — 6.4 mi
• La Vernia — 6.4 mi
• Immanuel Lutheran Church — 6.7 mi