It's crunch time for Zenkaikon. We leave tomorrow and spend three and a quarter lovely days in beautiful downtown Lancaster, hobnobbing with other weirdos (most of them in costume). I'll be doing two presentations about Lancaster history and one about Celtic mythology. I'm not sure which ones will be available to watch via Zenkaikon Online, but they did make it free for everyone this year - so if and when I have links to share, I'll provide them for anyone who might care to watch me babble about history. I'll also return to uploading podcast episodes next week when it's over, I want to do a little fine-tuning.
For today, you just get to read my babbling. We're going to skip back in time just a little over a century, back to when air mail was a relatively new thing and somewhat dangerous to boot. A little community in central Pennsylvania was key to the success of the endeavor.
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| The marker is situated at Bellefonte High School, 830 East Bishop Street |
The U.S. Post Office Department, as it was called then, particularly needed to establish a route between New York City and Chicago. They dispatched a pair of pilots, Max Miller and Edward Gardner, to figure out the straightest route between the two cities, and they departed on their mission on September 5, 1918. They soon worked out that the cities were 821 miles apart, and that the shortest distance between them passed through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The air mail pilots, after some trial and error with different models, would be flying de Haviland DH-4 planes, and these would need to refuel a few times during the journey.
Cleveland was established as one refueling point, but regardless of whether the plane was flying from Chicago to New York or vice versa, it would start running out of fuel over central Pennsylvania. There needed to be another refueling spot created there. The lovely rural community of Bellefonte was regarded as the perfect choice - it had plenty of open fields for takeoffs and landings, and it sits high enough above sea level that flooding wouldn't pose any sort of threat. Regular air mail service between the two cities was set to begin in November 1918, with Bellefonte as the only scheduled stop in Pennsylvania.
The refueling station was created at the Thomas Beaver farm, on what today is East Bishop Street. The postal service built a hangar big enough to house three planes, and assigned a few pilots to Bellefonte as their home base. A chunk of land was designated for the landing strip, roughly 600 feet long and 200 feet wide, while the rest continued to be a working farm. Thomas Beaver's cattle spent their days in a separate pasture, but at night were brought onto the landing field to graze and keep the grass from growing too high. Mail was flown out of Bellefonte for the first time on December 18, 1918.
The first years of Air Mail Service were difficult, and dangerous, and many lessons were learned at the cost of pilots' lives. Records show that in 1921 alone, there were more than 1,700 forced landings - roughly half due to mechanical failures, half because of weather - and twelve pilot deaths. The leg of the journey between Bellefonte and Cleveland, over the treacherous Allegheny Mountains, came to be known as "Hell's Stretch." In total, 34 pilots died during the years of this service, roughly one out of every six employed.
The danger of flying through bad weather were made particularly clear in 1919. During a two-week period of heavy rain and fog on the East Coast, there were fifteen crashes of airmail planes. This led to a pilot strike in July of that year, as the Post Office Department refused to change their policy about requiring the mail to be flown in all weathers. The strike finally ended when Otto Praeger, the assistant postmaster general, agreed that pilots could negotiate with field managers if they felt unsafe. On November 15th of that same year, the Bellefonte hangar burned down thanks to a faulty stovepipe; five planes, two motorcycles, and a truck were destroyed in the blaze. A new hangar wasn't constructed until the following year due to strikes in the steel industry.
As the Roaring Twenties ensued, airplane technology improved and more efficient ways to deliver transcontinental mail were devised. All-night mail flights from New York to San Francisco became a reality, so lights were installed on the Bellefonte runway in 1923 to allow planes to land for fueling even in the dark. But just two years later, air mail was contracted out to commercial airlines, with a company called National Air Transport making the winning bid for the route between Chicago and New York. Bellefonte was supplanted for air mail use by a new commercial airfield near Pleasant Gap, which boasted a beacon system, field lights, and a bigger hangar.
The airfield is gone, but not forgotten. In 2005, the American Philatelic Society dedicated a memorial to the pilots who lost their lives during those early days of air mail service. The marble stone sits between the junction of two small local waterways, Logan Run and Spring Creek, and the parking lot of the APS headquarters at the former Pennsylvania Match Factory. Meanwhile, the Bellefonte Historical and Cultural Association maintains a collection of photos on their website; if you'd like to see the hangar and some of the original air mail planes, check out the link in my sources section.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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