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WPA Projects at Kyle School
Kyle, Texas
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.
