Kyle: A Railroad Water Stop That Became a Boomtown

Kyle, Texas started as a water stop. The International-Great Northern Railroad was building its Central Texas route in the eighteen seventies, and steam engines needed water every ten to fifteen miles. On July twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty, David Moore and Fergus Kyle deeded two hundred acres to the railroad for a townsite and depot.

The town was named for Fergus Kyle, one of the landowners. Residents moved in from Mountain City three miles west and from Blanco forty miles away, and by eighteen eighty-three the population had passed five hundred. Kyle sat eight miles north of San Marcos and twenty miles south of Austin, and for most of its history it was a quiet agricultural Hays County community.

Then came the Austin tech boom. In two thousand, Kyle had about five thousand people. By two thousand twenty it had surpassed forty-five thousand, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, a onetime railroad water stop that the suburbs finally caught.