Founding Families & the Archives of Flight

Before Richardson was the Telecom Corridor, it was a cluster of pioneer families from Kentucky and the Carolinas who organized churches in cabins and buried their dead in family plots on the prairie. This driving loop traces that older Richardson: two of its founding congregations, the cemetery a Cumberland Presbyterian minister opened after the death of his daughter, and — as a fitting modern coda — the great aviation archive at the University of Texas at Dallas, where the records of flight are preserved a few miles from where wagon trains once rolled. The route runs from the white frame churches of Greenville Avenue to a research collection that spans the whole history of human flight, binding the town's settler roots to the technology age it would later help build.