HosScans Honored with Leadership in Preservation Award from the Collin County Historical Commission

On April 25, 2026, at the 19th Annual Preservation Celebration hosted by the Collin County Historical Commission in Farmersville, Texas, HosScans received the Leadership in Preservation Award. We'll be honest — we didn't do this work expecting recognition. We did it because the buildings deserved to be documented, and because that's what LiDAR is built for.

The award recognizes our work on two historic Collin County homes — one in Wylie, one in Melissa — both facing relocation. Before either structure moved, we came in with our scanner, captured them completely, and donated the as-built documentation to the local historical societies at no charge. This is the story of those two projects and why accurate documentation matters just as much for history as it does for construction.

About the Collin County Historical Commission

The Collin County Historical Commission works to identify, protect, and promote the historical and cultural resources of Collin County, Texas. Their Annual Preservation Celebration — now in its 19th year — recognizes individuals, organizations, and businesses that take active steps to protect the county's built heritage.

The Leadership in Preservation Award is among the most meaningful recognitions given at that event. We are grateful to the Commission and to the communities of Wylie and Melissa for this honor.

The Scott-Barker House, Melissa, TX — Documenting an 1880 Homestead

Built in 1880, the Scott-Barker House is among the oldest documented residential structures in what is now Melissa, Texas. Homes from this era — constructed in the years following the Civil War, when North Texas was still being actively settled — are increasingly rare. Most have been lost to development, weather, or neglect.

When we learned the Scott-Barker House was being relocated, we recognized the problem immediately: moving a structure preserves the physical material, but it doesn't preserve the record of how that home existed — its layout, its geometry, its relationship to the original site. Without documentation, that information disappears permanently.

Using our LiDAR scanning equipment, we captured the full interior and exterior of the Scott-Barker House before the move. From that scan data, we produced and donated to the Melissa Historical Society:

• As-built plans documenting the home's existing conditions

• Dimensioned floor plans showing room layouts and key measurements

• Elevation drawings of all exterior faces

• A graphic site plan showing the structure's original footprint and site orientation

Those documents now serve as a permanent, accurate record of the Scott-Barker House as it stood for nearly 150 years — available to historians, researchers, and future generations. (Read the full Scott-Barker House case study.)

The Stonehaven House, Wylie, TX — Capturing a Prairie-Style Legacy

The Stonehaven House in Wylie, Texas tells a different kind of story. Built in 1912, the home reflects the influence of the Prairie Style movement — the architectural philosophy championed by Frank Lloyd Wright during his most prolific period.

Prairie Style architecture is defined by its horizontal emphasis, low-pitched rooflines, strong integration with the surrounding landscape, and open floor plan concepts that were genuinely radical for the time. That a home built in Wylie, Texas in 1912 would draw from that tradition speaks to how far the movement's influence reached — even into small North Texas communities.

When the Stonehaven House was moved roughly 400 feet from its original location to escape encroaching development, it lost its original fireplace and arrived with no surviving blueprints. As with the Scott-Barker project, we wanted to ensure something lasting was preserved beyond the physical structure itself.

Our team completed a full LiDAR scan of the Stonehaven House and produced and donated to the Wylie Historical Society:

• As-built plans documenting existing conditions

• Dimensioned floor plans capturing the Prairie-influenced spatial layout

• Interior and exterior elevation drawings

• A graphic site plan

The architectural character of a Prairie Style home — the proportions, the horizontal emphasis, the spatial relationships between rooms — is exactly what's hardest to convey in a photograph and hardest to lose when it's captured in a measured drawing derived from a LiDAR scan. (Read the full Stonehaven House case study.)

Why LiDAR Is the Right Tool for Historic Preservation

LiDAR is the right tool for historic preservation because it records a structure's exact geometry — millions of measured points at ±5mm accuracy — instead of relying on the approximate hand measurements that aging, settled buildings defeat. For relocation, that precision matters immediately. For historians, it matters for decades, because the record is exact rather than estimated.

Traditional documentation methods — hand measurement, photography, hand-drawn plans — have served historians for generations. But they come with real limitations when applied to older structures.

A building from 1880 or 1912 has typically experienced decades of settling. Walls aren't perfectly plumb. Floors aren't perfectly level. Openings shift. Hand measurements of an irregular, aging structure are inherently approximate, and those approximations compound across a full set of drawings.

When our scanner captures a building, it records millions of individual measurement points across every surface — walls, floors, ceilings, doorways, rooflines — simultaneously. The result is a point cloud: a complete three-dimensional digital record of the structure exactly as it exists at the moment of capture.

From that point cloud, we extract floor plans with real dimensions, elevation drawings that reflect actual geometry, and site plans that document the true footprint and orientation of the structure. Every line in those drawings comes from a measured data point, not an estimate. A century from now, someone can look at those drawings and know exactly how those homes were laid out — not approximately. Exactly.

What This Means to HosScans

HosScans was built to serve commercial real estate, construction, and facility management clients across Dallas–Fort Worth. That's our core business and what we do every day. But these preservation projects are a reminder of why documentation matters in the first place.

Buildings are records. They hold information about how people lived, how they built, and what they valued. When a building moves or is lost without documentation, that information is gone permanently. What we can do with a LiDAR scanner in a few hours used to be impossible to do at all.

Being recognized by the Collin County Historical Commission for this work is something we're genuinely proud of. These projects didn't involve a fee. They involved an opportunity to do something meaningful for the communities where we live and work.

We're already in conversations with other historical organizations across North Texas and hope to keep finding ways to put this technology to work for preservation.

Working With a Historic Structure That Needs Documentation?

If you represent a historical society, a preservation organization, or own a historic structure facing relocation or renovation, we'd like to hear from you. LiDAR documentation doesn't have to be out of reach, and for the right projects, we're open to a conversation about how we can help.

You can reach us directly at info@hos-scans.com, explore our as-built documentation services, or browse our case studies to learn more about what we captured on these two projects.