Bridge No. 44, now known as the Bunton Branch Bridge, stands just north of Kyle on a north-south road that parallels Interstate 35, a remnant of the 1915 Austin-San Antonio post road. It crosses Bunton Branch, an intermittent tributary of Plum Creek that runs southeast across Hays and Caldwell Counties, with headwaters east of Mountain City in Hays County, and the branch was named for the family of Col. John W. Bunton, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The 42-foot-long concrete bridge was built in 1915 by J.N. George & Sons Construction Company as part of the first federal aid highway projects in Texas. It has a single closed-spandrel arch forty feet in length supported by reinforced concrete abutments, and its concrete deck, measuring 20 feet in width, carries one-lane traffic over an 18-foot-wide roadway. Among thirty-five bridges built across a span of 78 miles for this project, it is the only known reinforced concrete arch bridge. Improvements to the Austin-San Antonio Road, later State Highway 2, and the construction of bridges like this one brought a wave of travel and tourism to central Texas, and 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 highway's alignment and abandoned the old post road section over Bunton Branch Bridge, which remains one of the few tangible links to this historic highway in Hays County.