DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the Texas Historical Commission put on the marker for the Bunton Branch Bridge, just north of Kyle in Hays County. Now settle in, because this little concrete arch has a bigger story than it looks. There's a stretch of road that runs north-south just outside Kyle, quiet as a church mouse, sitting in the shadow of Interstate 35.
Most folks blow right past it doing seventy-five without a second thought. But that old road has been there since 1915, and it remembers when it was the main event — the Austin-San Antonio post road, carrying everything and everyone between two of Texas's most important cities. The creek it crosses is called Bunton Branch — an intermittent tributary of Plum Creek, running southeast across Hays and Caldwell Counties, with its headwaters east of Mountain City.
The branch itself was named for the family of Colonel John W. Bunton, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. So before you even get to the bridge, you're already standing on ground soaked in Texas history.
Now, the bridge. Bridge Number 44. Built in 1915 by J.N.
George and Sons Construction Company as part of the very first federal aid highway projects in all of Texas. Let that land. The first.
Out of thirty-five bridges built across a span of seventy-eight miles along that road, this is the only known reinforced concrete arch bridge in the bunch. Every other one went a different direction. This one — forty-two feet long, a single closed-spandrel arch forty feet in length, sitting on reinforced concrete abutments, with a deck twenty feet wide carrying traffic over an eighteen-foot roadway — this one went its own way.
And it survived. Because here's the thing about being the only one of your kind: it matters. When the state highway department came along in the 1930s and shifted the alignment of the highway — the road had become State Highway 2 by then, one of the heaviest traveled roads in Texas by the 1920s, a genuine wave of travel and tourism rolling through central Texas — they abandoned the old section of post road right over Bunton Branch Bridge.
They just left it. Set it aside like a tool nobody needed anymore. But you can't abandon the only one of something.
Not really. Today, that 1915 concrete arch still stands just north of Kyle, one of the few tangible links left in Hays County to that old Austin-San Antonio highway. The interstate thunders past nearby, and the trucks don't know what they're missing.
The Bunton Branch still runs southeast below, intermittent as ever, named for a man who signed his name to Texas independence. And Bridge Number 44 keeps its post, quiet and singular, holding the line between what was and what's left. In Texas, that's not nothing.
That's everything.
What the marker says
Bridge No. 44, now known as the Bunton Branch Bridge, is located just north of Kyle on a north-south section of road that parallels Interstate 35, a remnant of the 1915 Austin-San Antonio post road. The bridge crosses Bunton Branch, an intermittent tributary of Plum Creek that runs in a southeast direction across Hays and Caldwell Counties. The creek has its headwaters east of Mountain City in Hays County and was named after the family of a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Col. John W. Bunton. The 42-foot long concrete structure was built in 1915 by J.N. George & Sons Construction Company as part of the first federal aid highway projects in Texas. The bridge is composed of a single closed-spandrel arch forty feet in length supported by reinforced concrete abutments. The bridge’s deck, measuring 20 feet in width, is composed of concrete and carries one-lane traffic over an 18-foot wide roadway. Out of thirty-five bridges built within a distance spanning 78 miles, the Bunton Branch Bridge is the only known reinforced concrete arch bridge as part of this project. The improvements made to the Austin-San Antonio Road (later state highway 2) and the construction of bridges like this one resulted in a wave of travel and tourism for central Texas. By the 1920s, State Highway 2 was one of the heaviest traveled roads in the state. In the 1930s, the state highway department changed the alignment of the highway, abandoning the section of old post road over Bunton Branch Bridge. Today, this historic bridge is one of the few tangible links to this historic highway in Hays County. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2012