Kuykendall House
Moody, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1881 Dr. P.M. Kuykendall (b. 1855) bought this land which once belonged to Joseph Naler. This Victorian residence with Queen Anne style detailing and fish scale shingling was built in 1900 using plans ordered from a St. Louis architect. A prominent physician, Dr. Kuykendall helped found Moody Masonic Lodge and served on the Jefferson Academy Board. He and his wife Ella Naylor (McLeod) and their four children occupied this home.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1881 Dr. P. M. Kuykendall bought this McLennan County land, and in 1900 he built a Queen Anne–detailed Victorian home from plans ordered from a St. Louis architect, complete with decorative fish-scale shingling. A prominent physician, he helped found the Moody Masonic Lodge and served on the Jefferson Academy board. He and his wife Ella and their four children made the house their home.
Why it matters
The house reflects the confident civic life and mail-order architecture of a small Texas town at the turn of the twentieth century.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · P. M. Kuykendall
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Welborn-Bostick Home
Moody, TX
Missouri natives James Irby Welborn and his wife Nettie bought this Central Texas land in 1860 and gave generously to their community, donating acreage for Moody College and right-of-way for the Santa Fe Railroad. Their son George built the present home in 1914 on the old family homesite, and later generations carried the property forward. By the marker's telling, Welborn descendants had lived on the land 121 years — the oldest family-owned property in Moody.
First Baptist Church of Eddy
Eddy, TX
Begun in 1875 as Sage Chapel, this congregation literally moved with its town, hauling its one-room frame sanctuary two miles east to the new railroad community of Eddy in 1882. In an era when a small settlement could afford only one building, the church doubled as the community schoolhouse and was even shared with the local Methodists until a dedicated Baptist sanctuary rose in 1912 — the third structure, after two earlier ones burned. The church grew alongside the town it helped anchor.
Roy Bedichek
Eddy, TX
Roy Bedichek came to Falls County at age six and, after graduating from the University of Texas in 1903, worked as reporter, editor, teacher, and homesteader before joining the university in 1917. As the second director of the University Interscholastic League from 1922, he spent 26 years shaping academic, athletic, and musical competitions for schoolchildren statewide. A lifelong naturalist, he wrote the beloved "Adventures with a Texas Naturalist" (1947) and was remembered by friend J. Frank Dobie as having "the most richly stored mind" he ever knew.
Blevins Community and School
Eddy, TX
Blevins took root around 1860 when Thomas H. Barron, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, settled his family near Deer Creek. The Rev. Isaac Taylor kept a school for local children through the 1870s until Blevins School opened in 1885, later organized as a formal district serving a nine-square-mile area into 1939. At its height the little community supported two general stores, two cotton gins, two churches, a blacksmith, and an ice house before slowly fading.