This Day in Texas History: Town of Kyle Established
This Day in Texas History:
Town of Kyle Established
July 24, 1880
On this day in 1880, the town of Kyle was established when David E. Moore and Fergus Kyle (for whom the town was named) deeded 200 acres for a townsite to the International-Great Northern Railroad.
Kyle is on Interstate Highway 35 eight miles north of San Marcos and twenty miles south of Austin in northeastern Hays County. The new town drew residents and businesses from Mountain City, three miles west, and Blanco, some forty miles west. Tom Martin operated the first business in Kyle.
The community’s population exceeded 500 by 1882 but later declined. Kyle was incorporated in 1928 as a general-law city with a mayor and five council members. In 1937 Mary Kyle Hartson, a seventy-two-year-old great-grandmother and the daughter of Fergus Kyle, was elected mayor by a write-in vote; her victory attracted national attention, including a feature story in Life magazine which proclaimed her the only woman mayor in Texas.
In the early 1940s Kyle was noted as the only Texas town with an all-woman government. In the year 2000 Kyle contained some 200 businesses and 5,314 inhabitants.
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