Kyle: Katherine Anne Porter's Hometown

Long before the subdivisions arrived, Kyle was a prairie railroad townsite laid out in 1880 on land the Kyle family gave the International-Great Northern — and it happened to raise one of America's finest short-story writers. Katherine Anne Porter spent her childhood here before going on to win the Pulitzer Prize and write the bestselling novel Ship of Fools. This drive threads the small downtown grid the railroad created, pausing at Porter's restored childhood home, the auction oak where lots were once sold under the branches, the old café that anchored Main Street, and the founding Kyle family's own homes. It ends a few miles out of town at the log house of Claiborne Kyle, and near the resting place of John Wheeler Bunton, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence — the kind of deep roots an easy-to-miss commuter town turns out to hold.