WPA Projects at Kyle School
Kyle, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
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)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Public schooling in Kyle traces to the Texas Constitution of 1876, when trustees including Captain Fergus Kyle founded the Summit School; consolidation and a move in 1890 established the Kyle Public Free School on this site. In the depths of the Great Depression, the school board turned to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, which funded about three-quarters of a new auditorium-gymnasium and home economics cottage. Built of locally quarried limestone by local labor beginning in 1936, the WPA buildings served as classrooms and community centers for decades.
Why it matters
It shows how New Deal work relief reached into small Texas towns, leaving behind durable public buildings that outlasted the crisis that created them.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Fergus Kyle
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration construction (1936–1938)
- · Great Depression
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Buda School
Buda, TX
The Buda school system grew from the consolidation of several nineteenth-century country schools, beginning with Mary Adams's 1881 classroom beside the railroad tracks. Successive buildings rose and burned, and the present Mission-style schoolhouse of 1928 was built around the surviving walls of its predecessor, still visible in the auditorium. Over the twentieth century the school integrated its Mexican American and African American students and eventually merged into the Hays Consolidated district.
Antioch Colony
Buda, TX
Antioch Colony was a farming community formed after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans who found it hard to buy land in freedom. Beginning in 1870, Anglo businessman Joseph Rowley sold parcels along Onion Creek to former slaves, sometimes writing restrictions into the deeds that may have been meant to protect the new owners from losing their property. Residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated land for a school and church in 1874, and the colony sustained Baptist and Methodist churches, a Masonic lodge, and an Eastern Star chapter until families drifted away by the 1950s; descendants have since returned to reclaim ancestral land.
Old Main
San Marcos, TX
Completed in 1903 on land the city of San Marcos donated for a state teachers' college, Old Main rose as the administration building of the Southwest Texas Normal School. Its Victorian Gothic silhouette — four corner towers with pyramid roofs, steep gables, arched windows, and roof finials — announced that higher education had come to the Hill Country. It became the founding landmark of what is today Texas State University.
Site of Hays County's First Public Building
San Marcos, TX
In 1847, San Marcos settlers raised a rough log house of elm, cedar, and cypress on this spot — dirt floor, split-log benches, and a single room asked to be everything at once. It served as the young county's courthouse after Hays County was organized in 1848, hosted the first Presbyterian and Baptist congregations, sat beside a stagecoach stop, and later became a drill headquarters for Confederate recruits. Fallen into disuse, it burned in 1874.