I've always wondered about the little fieldstone airport we see along County Road 629 when we drive out to the Grand Traverse Lighthouse near the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula and Northport, Michigan.
The building looks more like an outdoor museum than a busy airport, but we stopped to take a closer look at the airport one day near the tail-end of last summer and learned that the site had an interesting story behind it.
The airport bears the name of Clinton F. Woolsey, a Northport native born on August 29, 1894. His parents Byron and Sarah Woolsey had eight children, all of them daughters except for one of their youngest children, Clinton.
Clinton went to school in Northport before heading to Valparaiso University in Indiana to study engineering for three years.
In 1916, he enlisted in the Indiana National Guard as a private. He transferred to the Air Service in 1917.
He loved flying and ended up in San Antonio, Texas for flight training before going overseas for duty at the end of World War I.
The young pilot was one of the most well-regarded pilots in the Army Air Corps during the 1920s.
He dreamed of flying solo across the Atlantic, and he designed a plane he called the Woolsey Bomber with that goal in mind. Woolsey put his goal on hold when he received an assignment in 1925 to take a 22,000-mile flight as part of a crew of pilots flying to 23 Central and South American countries as part of the first United States' International Goodwill flight.
He oversaw construction and testing of five amphibian observation planes making the trip.
The planes, each named for an American city (Detroit, New York, San Antonio, San Francisco and St. Louis) had open cockpits, no radios, no real flight instruments or maps with much of the planned flight taking place over uncharted territory.
Woolsey and his co-pilot, John Benton, received the assignment to fly the Detroit, and the group departed from San Antonio in late 1926.
Things went well until about halfway through the planned trip on February 27, 1927 when the planes took off from Chile in heavy cloud cover and bound for Buenos Aires.
The Detroit had a broken cable in the mechanism that raised and lowered the plane's left wheels during water landings. Woolsey and Benton opted to save time by going ahead and taking off with a plan to have Benton climb out onto the plane's wing to manually lower the wheel as they landed at Palomar Field.
The eight planes flew in a tight diamond formation at about 1,400 to 1,600 feet, and at about 100 miles per hour, as they approached Palomar to land in front of a large crowd of dignitaries.
Then things went horribly wrong.
With Benton on the wing, the Detroit's wing inadvertently touched the New York, with the planes briefly becoming intertwined
The pilot of the New York managed to spin away from the Detroit and the two men in the New York parachuted to safety.
Woolsey had easy access to his parachute, but he elected to stay with the plane on the way down as Benton, still on the wing, had no parachute to deploy.
The Detroit crashed to the ground and burst into flames. Woolsey died in the cockpit while Benton, thrown from the plane, also died.
Fellow pilots hailed Woolsey as a hero because of his last-minute attempt to somehow land the plane to save Benton.
More than 2,000 people braved a late-March snowstorm to attend Woolsey's funeral and burial in Northport.
In 1934, Woolsey's father Byron donated 80 acres of land to Leelanau County on the condition that it be an airport dedicated in honor of his son. The county added another 120 acres to the plot.
The one thing that originally caught my eye with this airport was how it resembled many public works projects constructed during the 1930s in Michigan that I've seen. Sure enough, the creation of the airport runway and expansion of Byron Woolsey's creamery/milk transfer station into an airport terminal was a Works Progress Administration project.
The little airport looks much as it did at the time of its July 14, 1935 dedication.
The airport generally stays open from March through November, or whenever there isn't snow on the runway.
Each summer, a Fly-in and Pancake Breakfast draws about 1,500 to see displays of vintage aircraft, military aircraft and antique and custom cars.
Airport visitors can stop by, climb up into the open observation area or have picnic at by the terminal. Six planes call the airport home and an average of 42 flight operations take place each month from April through October.
And while Woolsey himself never got the chance to make that solo trans-Atlantic flight, a young man who reportedly took flying lessons with Woolsey did make that flight.
Ever hear of Charles Lindbergh and his flight across the Atlantic in 1927?
© Dominique King 2015 All rights reserved
I love the write-up you did on the airport. Clinton is my husband's great grandfather and we visited in 2011 at he annual fly-in. One of the pilots even let my husband take control of his Cessna on an hour flight. A long hour for me on the ground!
Posted by: stacybuckeye | March 18, 2015 at 10:50 AM
Stacy-Thanks for stopping by! I always wondered about this airport, and I'm so glad that we stopped by to learn more about it the most recent time we visited the area. I bet that slight was a thrill for your husband, and nice to see that folks continue to honor his great grandfather at the airport!
Posted by: Dominique King | March 18, 2015 at 11:40 AM