About this tour
Leander sits on top of layered history — some of it staggeringly old. Just outside town, roadbuilders in 1983 uncovered the skeleton of a woman who died some ten to thirteen thousand years ago, one of the oldest and most complete human burials ever found in North America. Nicknamed the "Leanderthal Lady," she puts a human face on the deep prehistory of Central Texas. The rest of this drive belongs to the frontier and rail era: the vanished pioneer town of Old Bagdad that faded when the railroad favored Leander instead, the 1839 Webster Massacre remembered at an overlook, and two surviving pioneer homes. It's a compact loop across an astonishing stretch of time, from an Ice-Age grave to a nineteenth-century ghost town.