Kyle Cemetery

Claiborne Kyle came to Texas about 1844 because of a debt that was not his own: a friend for whom he had posted bond in Mississippi absconded. A former Mississippi state senator, he spent a year at Gonzales and four in Austin before settling in Hays County in 1850. That November he sat on the county's first grand jury and served as its treasurer, and he later served in the Texas Senate and, during the Civil War, the House. His daughter Lucy Emma married Edward Burleson Jr.; their son Albert Sidney Burleson became Woodrow Wilson's postmaster general.

What the plaque says

Kyle Cemetery Many people instrumental in the early development of this area are buried in Kyle Cemetery. Colonel Clairborne Kyle, one of Hays County's original settlers, buried his adopted son, willie Parks, here in 1849. Although Parks' interment is the first recorded at this site, local tradition claims that a man found hanging from a live oak tree located within these cemetery grounds was the first person buried here; that tree was thereafter referred to as "the hanging tree." Although it is believed that Claiborne Kyle set aside fifteen acres of his land surrounding these early interments for use as a community the first legal document mentioning Kyle Cemetery is a deed executed by his son, Polk, donating 5 acres for a burial ground in 1877. five additional acres were purchased for the cemetery in 1899 from Jason and Fannie Wilson by trustees w. L. Stephenson, J. H. white and d. W. Benner. Another five acres were donated to the newly incorporated cemetery in 1906 by O. g. Parke. Among the gravesites here are those of many area pioneers, including the Claiborne Kyle family, Edward Burleson, Jr., Ezekiel Nance, and veterans of the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 5.2 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 — 15 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 — 18 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 20 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• Beef for the Confederacy — 1.3 mi
• Kyle Auction Oak — 2.0 mi
• Kyle — 2.1 mi
• John Wheeler Bunton — 2.1 mi