Kyle Auction Oak

Fergus Kyle grew up in a four-room log house near here and went to war as a private in Terry's Texas Rangers, the Eighth Texas Cavalry. After Shiloh he became captain, with his four brothers under his command, and later served as aide to Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham; he wore his Confederate gray for the rest of his life. He was one of few Democrats in the Reconstruction legislature of 1870-71. Back in the House in 1901, he cosponsored the 1905 bill that bought the Alamo, and he died in 1906 as the legislature's oldest member.

What the plaque says

Kyle Auction Oak When Kyle was founded along the International & Great Northern Railroad in 1880, this giant liveoak was site of a public auction of town lots. The railway was given 200 acres of land by Fergus Kyle (1834-1905), state representative for whom the community was named, and the family of David E. Moore. Free rides were provided to the townsite on auction day, Oct. 14, 1880, and all business and most residential lots were sold. In 1881, the railroad gave 4 acres around the tree for a school, Kyle Seminary, which burned in 1889. The Alex Kercheville family now (1975) owns and preserves the tree. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 7.2 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 — steps away
• Kyle Cemetery — 2.0 mi
• Beef for the Confederacy — 2.5 mi