My friend and fellow columnist Don Newbury suggested a column on the history of the Brownwood airport. What I found while reading about it, is that there is a lot of prehistory, air transport before the airport was built, that is actually remarkable. I did not realize that Brownwood was a bit of an early bird in experimental flight, and has several very early events that are worth noting, especially the adventures of one of the first female pilots in the country, and her connection with the area

Air travel did not wait for the airport to be built here, but started out as an experiment of sorts. According to the Brown County History website, the first flight into the county was in October 1913, instigated by the US Post Office Department in Washington for the purpose of testing mail flights between Comanche and Brownwood. The site says, “aeroplane mail service between Brownwood and Comanche, Texas has been established between their post offices on October 10, 11, 12, 1913, one trip each way each day. Lester Miller of Dallas was the aviator. He made flights each day during the Free Fall Fair.” This ambitious project was sort of like a next generation of the Pony Express I guess. The idea of delivering mail by plane might have turned out to be cost prohibitive, and probably difficult logistically, as that is the last we hear of the plan. 1913 is pretty early when you consider that the first ever airplane flight took place only 10 years earlier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The lady in the photo above, Miss Katherine Stinson, was the next to make flight history in Brownwood. Stinson was, “the youngest aviator in the world who has passed all the International Tests.” and she made daily flights at the Brownwood Free Fall Fair. You could take a ride with Stinson as your pilot for 25 dollars. She carried bold fair goers up into the clouds charging $25.00 per passenger. The Coleman Daily Voice, in 1915, contains a borderline risqué paragraph about Miss Stinson’s flights, stating, “Some married men who have the habit of flying around with other women might make the trip with Miss Katherine Stinson from Texas to San Francisco in an airship.” Stinson “was an American aviation pioneer who, in 1912, became the fourth woman in the United States to earn the FAI pilot certificate. She set flying records for aerobatic maneuvers, distance, and endurance. She was the first female pilot employed by the U.S. Postal Service and the first civilian pilot to fly the mail in Canada. She was also one of the first pilots to ever fly at night and the first female pilot to fly in Canada and Japan,” according to Wikipedia. It seems likely that Stinson’s work for the Post Office was what occasioned the flights for the Brownwood fair. They were a popular form of entertainment locally for several years.

The mention of Fall Fairs made me wonder if they were landing the planes at the fairgrounds at that early date. It seems they did, employing the old racetrack (which, incidentally, is a flat field today right behind the DPS office and Walmart), along with a location described as west of the end of Austin Avenue. There, in 1920, “Lieutenants R. W. Lutz and F. E. Monor of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, flew a practically new Curtis type plane over Brownwood,” landing at the Austin Avenue location. There are several other landings noted in the historical record, another of which took place in 1926 when a group of University of Texas students landed a plane at “Brownwood Floral Company’s greenhouses, just north of Avenue K.”

A project for launching the Brownwood Municipal Airport of today was conceived in 1932, marking the beginning of the end for the wild west type landings around town that must have occasioned a lot of talk and speculation. In 1935, a Dr. Fuller began directing the construction of the facility on a “200 acre tract leased by the city from the county,’ where the current airport is still located. In 1913, Brownwood was not far from its roots as a frontier town in Comanche territory. It must have been quite a thrill to see the first “airship” as they called them at the time, zoom overhead and land down by the bayou. Back then futurists were full of optimism, seeing the world changing fast. It must have inspired many local young people to watch it happen right in their own small town.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to littleadams@gmail.com.