WPA Projects at Kyle School

Kyle's high school once used the town hall as its auditorium. The city hall, built in 1912 in Mission Revival style and credited to an Austin architect named R. L. Thomas, housed city government and served the school that way until 1937. WPA crews started the school's own combination auditorium and gymnasium in January 1936, the year before that use ended. After Kyle's Baptist church burned, that congregation also met in the old city hall. The limestone school buildings from the 1930s still stand on the campus.

What the plaque says

WPA Projects at Kyle School Public education in the Kyle area dates to the Texas Constitution of 1876 and its establishment of a statewide free school system. Under this legislation, school trustees D.A. Barbee, D.J.B. Barbee and Captain Fergus Kyle founded the Summit School that same year one mile northwest of Kyle. In 1877 the nearby Blanco Chapel School first held classes, and the two schools soon consolidated as Independence Hall. Citizens moved the Independence Hall schoolhouse to this site in 1890, marking the beginning of the Kyle Public Free School. The school grew steadily with the town, adding facilities to the campus, and by the 1930s the school board applied to the federal government for construction funds for a combination auditorium/gymnasium and a home economics cottage. Through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency active during the Great Depression, the U.S. government paid for about three-fourths of the cost, while Kyle voters approved a bond issue in February 1935 to fund the remainder. Work on the project began in January 1936, giving jobs to 29 men, and also resulting in general improvements to the school grounds and athletic fields. Voters approved additional bonds to complete the project in September 1936, and supplemental WPA funding helped pay for a new main classroom building in 1938. The WPA buildings at the Kyle campus, crafted by local labor and built of locally quarried limestone, have served since their construction as educational facilities and social centers. Kyle merged with other county schools in 1967 to form the Hays Consolidated Independent School District. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 7.5 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

• First Baptist Church of Kyle — steps away
• Katherine Anne Porter — steps away
• John Wheeler Bunton — 0.2 mi
• Kyle — 0.2 mi