Walter Herschel Beech

Walter Beech began flying at fourteen in a glider he built himself. After Army flying in the First World War and test piloting for Swallow, he joined Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna to form Travel Air in 1924. In 1932 he and his wife, Olive Ann Beech, founded Beech Aircraft in Wichita with Ted Wells, K. K. Shaul and the investor C. G. Yankey. Its twin-engine AT-7 and C-45 trained more than 90 percent of the Army Air Forces' navigator-bombardiers. He died in 1950, and the couple are buried together in Wichita.

What the plaque says

Walter Herschel Beech 1891-1950 Born in Pulaski, in 1891, Walter Herschel Beech was an aviation pioneer. In 1924 he helped to establish the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita, Kansas. By 1929 the company was the world's largest producer of commercial aircraft. In 1932, Beech and his wife founded Beech Aircraft Company, which produced more than, 7,400 military aircraft during World War II. Beech was inducted into the National (1977), International (1982), Kansas (1987), and Tennessee (2005) Aviation Halls of Fame.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — steps away
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.
• James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum — 17 mi
  A museum on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the Lawrenceburg square, honoring the shape-note publisher who built a songbook, quartet and radio empire here from 1903.
• David Crockett State Park — 19 mi
  A Lawrenceburg park on Shoal Creek where Davy Crockett ran a gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery from 1817, and later broke with Andrew Jackson over Indian removal.
• Meriwether Lewis Site — 32 mi
  The place on the Natchez Trace Parkway where Meriwether Lewis died in October 1809, with his 1848 monument, a pioneer cemetery, a walk on the Old Trace and a free campground.

More markers nearby

• Donald Grady Davidson and John Crowe Ransom — steps away
• Martin College — 0.5 mi
• Gabriel McKissack — 0.8 mi
• Bridgeforth High School — 0.9 mi