Kirk

The Handbook of Texas says German farmers settled Kirk in the 1870s, a detail the plaque leaves out. It dates the post office to 1890, when the village had four stores and a cotton gin; the plaque says 1887. In 1897 a one-teacher school served 122 pupils. The population reached 172 in 1900 but fell to thirty by 1933, rose to about 150 for most of the 1940s, and dropped to forty by 1950. The Handbook says the school district was absorbed by Mart in 1968, where the plaque dates the consolidation to 1952.

What the plaque says

Kirk Settlement began in this area in the 1870s-1880s. A community here, originally called Elm Grove, became known as Kirk when a post office established in 1887 was named for local merchant Jepitha N. Kirk. The first postmaster was William Hume McKnight. In 1884 G. W. and M. J. Swafford donated land for a school and cemetery. William M. and Annie J. Jacobs sold adjoining land in 1887 for the graveyard, a school, and for churches in Kirk. At its peak, Kirk was a thriving community of several hundred people and included homes, businesses, churches, and a post office. It also contained cotton gins, fraternal organizations and a telephone exchange. A two-story school containing six classrooms was built in 1911 at this site. In 1927 the community, led by school board president W.C. Curry and school principals Vernon Evans and J. B. Brown, Jr., built a large gymnasium/community hall (known locally as the Community House) just north of the school. Kirk's decline began with the great depression of the 1930s. In 1942 the last class graduated from Kirk High School, and the Kirk School consolidated with schools in Mart in 1952. Only a few homes and the cemetery remain in the area. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 10 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 11 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 21 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 23 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• Prairie Hill Cemetery — 6.5 mi
• First Baptist Church of Mart — 6.8 mi
• Booker T. Washington Park — 8.9 mi
• Battle Cemetery and Community — 9.9 mi