Kit Community

Kit began as a bet on a railroad. The Handbook of Texas says businessmen from Gorbett, an earlier settlement with a post office from 1889 to 1894, bought land along the proposed Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf route and laid out a town plat in 1882. In 1894 the name changed to Kit after mail was mixed up with another Gorbett. When it became clear the railroad would bypass Kit, some merchants moved to the new site of Irving beginning in 1903. The Kit post office closed in 1904, and by the 1960s only a few houses remained.

What the plaque says

Kit Community Virginia natives John W. and Jestine Gorbit had a farm in this area by 1850. A settlement known as Gorbit grew up around it and became a stop on a pre-Civil War postal route. In 1855, Jonathan Story moved here from Illinois with his wife and 13 children. Story's son, Isaac "Ike," who later returned to Illinois for several years, settled in Gorbit with his wife and children in 1873. He opened a store and in 1889 established a post office; his second wife, Mary Elizabeth, was the first postmaster. Because of confusion with a similarly named town, the Gorbit post office and settlement were renamed Kit in 1894. Residents established Kit Cemetery in 1896 near Ike Story's store. Early area schools included one that began in the late 1850s, with Hezekiah Lucas as teacher. Mark Callister Lively opened a school in 1890. Lively School served the Kit Community and functioned as the worship space for the area's first Catholic and Church of Christ congregations. Kit residents established Kit School in 1902. The Town of Irving was founded in 1903 west of the community, along the tracks of the Rock Island Railroad. Some of Kit's businesses and churches moved to the new townsite. The post office moved to Irving in 1904. Irving residents petitioned the legislature for a school district in 1909, and the Kit and Lively schools ecame the Irving Independent School District. Kit maintained its own identity for several more years, but by the 1940s, its once agricultural character had vanished into the growing City of Irving and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Today in Kit Cemetery, which is adjacent to Oak Grove Cemetery, are found the names of pioneer amilies - Story, Smith, Cox and many others - who contributed to the growth and development of Irving. (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 7.1 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 7.4 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 8.4 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 9.6 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Irving — 1.2 mi
• City of Irving — 1.8 mi
• Union Bower Community — 1.9 mi
• Trinity Portland Cement Company Cemetery — 2.3 mi