Kicaster, Texas

01Founding the Union School Community

The community took shape in the 1860s, when the families of Isaac Crow, R. T. Spivey, Dr. W. R. Callaway, T. P. Camp, J. E. Watkins, Isom Ferguson, and L. B. Pittman began farming the small sandy watershed of Kicaster Creek in northwestern Wilson County. The county itself had only been organized in 1860, carved out of Bexar and Karnes counties, and the Kicaster settlers arrived during the rough decade of Reconstruction, when south-central Texas was still rebuilding cattle trails, cotton markets, and civil institutions.

In 1872, settler John James donated land for a schoolhouse, which also served as a place for church services. That single donated lot became the social anchor for the community for the next seventy years. In 1887, A. C. and Mary Anderson gave additional land for public use, extending the footprint of the settlement beyond the original school plot.

02Why Was It Called Kicaster?

The name came by way of the post office. The Easterling post office opened in 1887 and was almost immediately renamed Kicaster, after the creek that drained the area. The post office operated for less than twenty years, closing in 1906. By then the community already had another identity shift underway: Silesian Poles from the adjacent community of St. Hedwig had begun purchasing farmland in and around Kicaster during the late nineteenth century, layering a Central European farming culture onto the Anglo-Southern one that had arrived after the Civil War. St. Hedwig, founded in 1855, is often cited as one of the oldest Polish settlements in the United States, and its eastward expansion into the Kicaster area is part of that broader migration story.

03A School That Outlasted the Post Office

By 1896 the Kicaster school had an enrollment of forty-nine students, a substantial number for a rural Wilson County community whose post office had already begun its decline. The school is the thread that held Kicaster together long after commercial traffic dried up. While the post office closed in 1906 and farm consolidation gradually emptied the surrounding fields, the schoolhouse kept operating into the twentieth century.

The school was finally phased out in 1940, part of the wave of rural school consolidations that reshaped small Texas communities between the two World Wars. Without the classroom, the churches that had shared the building moved away, and Kicaster lost the two institutions that had defined it for nearly seventy years. The 2000 census recorded a population of about 100 people scattered across the old community footprint, and neither the Texas Almanac nor the Handbook of Texas formally classifies Kicaster as a ghost town, though its core institutions are gone.

04What Happened to Kicaster, Texas?

There is no single dramatic collapse to point to. Kicaster did not burn, flood, or empty out after a mine closure. Its decline followed the long, quiet pattern of dryland farming communities across south-central Texas: small farms consolidated into larger ones, mechanization reduced the number of families needed to work the land, the post office lost enough volume to justify closure, and young people left for San Antonio and Floresville for work and schooling. The 1940 school closure was the final institutional break. After that, Kicaster existed more as a place on a map and a cemetery than as a functioning town.

05Can You Visit Kicaster Today?

Kicaster sits on Farm Road 3432, about twelve miles northwest of Floresville and within the Greater San Antonio metropolitan area. The drive runs through rolling farmland and oak motts typical of the Post Oak Savannah ecoregion. Visitors should treat surrounding land as private; the cemetery is the one site clearly associated with the historic community and the most appropriate place to stop.

06What Remains of Kicaster Today

Kicaster Cemetery, in use since the 1870s, now marks the site of the community. Its burials span the founding families and their descendants, and it functions as the last continuous institution of a settlement that once had a school, churches, and a post office. A Texas historical marker in the area records the community's story for travelers who know to look. Beyond the cemetery and the creek itself, there are no commercial structures, no standing schoolhouse, and no post office building left to photograph. What endures is a name on a farm road, a creek that still drains toward the San Antonio River basin, and the graves of the families who tried, for three quarters of a century, to build a town there.