Kyle

The Blanco or Nance community named here was Ezekiel Nance's. A former treasurer of Arkansas, he bought about 10,000 acres on the Blanco River west of present Kyle in 1852 and came with his family and enslaved people the next year. He built a rock fence against wild cattle, registered the second-oldest horse brand in the county, and put up a dog-run house that still stood in 1994. Within five years, using slave labor, he had dammed the Blanco and built a sawmill, a gristmill and later a cotton gin.

What the plaque says

Kyle Two antebellum settlements, the Blanco or Nance community (7 mi. W) and Mountain City (3 mi. W), provided the early population and business for Kyle after the city was founded in 1880. Fergus Kyle, for whom the town was named, and the family of David Moore donated 200 acres of land for a townsite when the International & Great Northern Railroad built a line from Austin to San Antonio. Lots were first sold in October 1880 as an auction held beneath a liveoak at 204 S. sledge Street. The first business was a saloon and meat market owned by Tom Martin. An 1895 election incorporated the town but voters discontinued the status two years later. Kyle was incorporated again in 1906 and J. W. Tompkins served as the first mayor. In the 1940s Kyle residents elected an all-woman municipal government. The mayor, who won using a write-in campaign, was Mary Kyle Hartson (1865-1956), daughter of Fergus Kyle. Her brother Edwin Jackson Kyle (b. 1876) was dean of the Texas A&M School of Agriculture. He later served in the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as the ambassador to Guatemala (1944-48). Kyle Football Field at Texas A&M University is named in his honor. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 7.3 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 14 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 16 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Barton Springs Pool — 20 mi
  A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.

More markers nearby

• John Wheeler Bunton — steps away
• Kyle Auction Oak — steps away
• Kyle Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• Beef for the Confederacy — 2.5 mi