Take Off to the East: Reno's First Airport and the Street That Still Points at It

Above: a United States Post Office Department mail plane fitted with experimental radio equipment for night flying, photographed at Bolling Field on 2 August 1922. It is not a Reno aircraft — it is the machine and the problem this article is about, photographed two years before night mail began crossing the Sierra.

There is a short street in south Reno called Grove. It runs east from South Virginia Street to Kietzke Lane, through about four blocks of car lots, apartment courts, a childcare playground and the back offices of a casino. Nothing on it is older than 1936. Nothing on it is remarkable.

Its latitude is 39.5013 degrees north.

Two and a quarter kilometres due west, on ground that is now the eleventh hole of a municipal golf course, there stood for fourteen years a steel hangar with a hundred-foot door. Its position is recorded as 39.501464 degrees north.

That is a difference of about half a metre.

Grove Street is a dead-straight east–west line aimed at the hangar of Reno's first airport. The airport's main runway ran east and west. Pilots were instructed to take off to the east.

No document says Grove Street was the road to the field. The alignment is the evidence, and the alignment is very hard to argue with.

A Thousand Feet of Gravel

On 8 September 1920 the United States Post Office Department opened the Omaha–San Francisco leg of the transcontinental air mail route. It ran through North Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Elko and Reno. The next day, 9 September, the first scheduled mail plane came down on a field two miles south of downtown Reno.

There was no hangar yet. Construction material for one arrived later that month.

Getting the field at all had taken the city most of a year of fumbling. In May 1920 the council and the county commissioners agreed to improve a place called Jensen Field, just outside the city at the west end of Seventh Street, for about three thousand dollars. That fell through. Within a week the attention had moved to land on Plumas Street, described in the paper of the day as lying just north of the golf links, and the council was asking the commissioners to have the district attorney bring condemnation suits against the owners of lots in the Berrum tract.

Reno got its airport by suing people for it.

What it got was modest. The 1920 plan called for two runways, each a hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, surfaced in gravel. The field sat at 4,497 feet above sea level. Its eastern boundary was Plumas Street. Its southern boundary was the fence of the Reno Golf Club, which is worth holding onto, because the golf club was there first and it is there now, and the airport is the thing in that sentence that did not last.

The Southside Ditch crossed the property.

The instructions issued to pilots in early 1921 are the most useful description of the place that survives, because they are written by people who had to live with it. The main runway ran east and west, marked with a T and a wind indicator. Approaches were unobstructed from four directions. Take off to the east, the instructions said, where a slight downgrade helps the aircraft gain flying speed. Just beyond the eastern edge, they warned, there is a huge ditch.

And then the line that tells you what this field actually was: departing to the southwest, gain at least ten thousand feet to clear the Sierra.

A thousand feet of gravel at four and a half thousand feet of elevation, in an open-cockpit biplane, to climb to ten thousand. That is the Reno air mail field. Everything else in this story follows from it.

The Door

The hangar was dedicated on 18 April 1921, and it was not an ordinary building.

The Post Office had told Reno it would make the city a stop if the city built a hangar to federal specification. What went up was a steel frame clad in corrugated asbestos–cement and corrugated wire glass, 105 feet square, with eighteen feet of clear headroom. Courses of wire glass ran across the roof and down each side wall, so the interior was lit by daylight.

The door is the reason anyone remembers it.

It was a single leaf, one hundred feet long and twenty-one feet high. It pivoted at the top of the jamb and swung outward and up, counterbalanced by a block of concrete weighing thirty-seven thousand five hundred pounds. It opened in twenty seconds.

That is not a door. That is a bascule bridge turned on its side and used as a door.

Popular Mechanics ran a feature on it in July 1921, which tells you how unusual a hundred-foot clear opening was in 1921. The design is credited to Joseph Baermann Strauss, who seventeen years later would be chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge.

That credit rests on a single account and no second source confirms it, so take it as probable rather than proven. But it is probable, and the door is the reason. Strauss's business was the Strauss Bascule Bridge Company, and a bascule span is precisely a leaf that lifts on a pivot against a massive concrete counterweight. He built them, including an overhead-counterweight type. In 1921 there was no firm in America better equipped to put a hundred-foot counterweighted leaf on a top pivot and have it move in twenty seconds. The honest form of the claim is that the hangar was designed by Strauss's firm, which is the same distinction that applies to his Golden Gate credit, where the structural engineering was Charles Alton Ellis's work.

Two documents would settle it: the July 1921 magazine feature, which would name the engineer, and the newspaper retrospective that is the source of the attribution in the first place. Neither is in hand.

There had been something on the site before. A municipal flying field existed there as early as 1918, unimproved, with no services at all, and a hangar is reported to have gone up in 1919 for the fledgling mail service. The Strauss building was probably the second structure to stand on that ground, not the first.

Big Bill

For its first four years the place was simply the Reno Air Mail Field. The name it carried afterwards belonged to a man from County Cork.

William Francis Blanchfield was born at Courtmacsherry, a fishing village on the south coast of Ireland. He flew reconnaissance for the Royal Air Force early in the First World War, and is reported to have brought down three German aircraft and reached the rank of major. He landed in New York on 16 April 1920, came on to Reno the same year, and applied for American citizenship as soon as he arrived. On 3 January 1921 he began flying the mail.

They called him Big Bill.

His route was Elko to Reno, and he flew it for three and a half years. In November 1922 he brought the mail in from Elko through a blizzard, and that is the flight that made him a local figure rather than a name on a roster. When night service began on 1 July 1924 and the transcontinental mail started running around the clock, he flew the Reno–Elko leg of the first day-and-night delivery.

He had a month to live.

On 1 August 1924 an air mail mechanic named Samuel Gerrans was buried in Reno. Gerrans was a native Nevadan and a veteran of the war. Blanchfield took a De Havilland DH-4 off the south side of the field, carrying a wreath, to drop it over the grave during the funeral.

His aerial assistant had fallen ill, so he was holding the wreath himself, in one hand, while flying the aircraft with the other.

He made three slow descending circles over the cemetery. On the last of them a gust put the DH-4 into a spin. It dove, struck power and telephone lines, caught fire, and came down against the porch of a house at 901 Ralston. He was killed instantly. He was twenty-nine.

The official fatality roll carries one further line about it, and it is a cold one: this was not an authorized flight.

He was buried on 4 August with full military honours. Another mail pilot flew a tribute over the funeral.

Seven days after that, on 11 August 1924, the mayor of Reno moved in council that the Reno Air Mail Field be renamed for him. The motion passed unanimously. The county board did the same.

And here is the detail that makes the whole thing human. The field was not named Blanchfield Field, which is what you would expect and what some records say. The spelling adopted was BlanchField, with a capital F in the middle, and it was a fellow mail pilot who proposed it — because everyone called the man Blanch.

So the odd two-word name that turns up on later maps and charts as Blanch Field is not a clerk's error at all. It is a pilots' joke, voted into the municipal record by a city council in mourning, and it outlived the airport, the airline, the hangar and every man in the room.

One more thing about Big Bill, because it is still going on.

From March 1925 his mother, in Courtmacsherry, began sending sprigs of shamrock to Reno to be laid on her son's grave. A local undertaker did it for her, every St Patrick's Day, for fifty years, until he died in 1975. Then a neighbour took it over. Then a Reno historian took it over. In 2012, at the request of people in Courtmacsherry, an Irish-American society in northern Nevada turned it into a formal ceremony. The centenary of his death was marked in March 2024, with proclamations read to three of his living descendants.

A hundred years of shamrocks for a pilot who died holding a wreath for someone else.

The Motor Macs

Thirty-four air mail pilots died flying the mail between 1918 and 1927. The service's own survivors called themselves a suicide club.

No surviving record breaks those deaths down by division, so the common claim that the Salt Lake–San Francisco run was the deadliest leg in the system cannot be checked. It does not need to be. You can make the argument from the infrastructure alone.

Reno to San Francisco was 184 miles, and by 1926 it was the shortest leg on the whole Omaha–San Francisco route. It was also the one that crossed the Sierra Nevada. Pilots and aircraft both changed at Reno, which is what a route does when a section is hard enough to need fresh men for it.

Going east out of Reno there was no intermediate landing field at all until the Lovelock and Derby country, ninety-odd miles away. Going west, the nearest thing to a refuge was an unimproved dirt strip called Black Rock, north of Truckee along the Lincoln Highway near what is now Prosser Dam Road. Two pilots are known to have used it in emergencies.

The aircraft, from 1920 to 1926, was the De Havilland DH-4: open cockpit, wood-framed, about 4,200 pounds, and in some cases a veteran of the Western Front. It was not built to climb to ten thousand feet.

So the mechanics at Reno Field — the Motor Macs — rebuilt the engines to roughly three hundred horsepower so the machines could reach about twelve thousand.

That is the single best fact in this whole story about what Reno actually was in the air mail system. It was not a stop. It was a shop. The Sierra was the obstacle the route was built around, and the men who made the crossing possible were not only the pilots but a crew of mechanics in a corrugated shed, taking war-surplus Liberty engines apart and putting them back together with more power than the airframe was designed for, because otherwise the mountain won.

What that work bought, read as a list of incidents, is sobering. An oil line bursting over Donner Summit in March 1927, the pilot blinded by oil, cutting the engine and gliding down to dig the nose into crusted snow and flip the aircraft; the man unhurt, the mail out by sleigh to Truckee and then by train. A downdraft at Donner Lake. A forced landing on Donner Summit in the winter of 1923. A blizzard tailspin of eight thousand feet with the control stick iced. A ditching in San Francisco Bay, an hour in the water, picked up by a tug. An inverted spin over Blue Canyon recovered about two hundred feet off the ground. A night descent through the Truckee River Canyon ending in a landing on an unlit Reno field.

Most of those belong to one man, Clare K. Vance, who had been the youngest commissioned aviation officer in France, joined the mail service at its start in 1920, flew San Francisco–Reno–Salt Lake City, set a Reno–Elko speed record in 1921, carried the first mail pouch over the Sierra when round-the-clock service began in July 1924 — navigating in part by moonlight — and claimed by 1922 some thirty-five hundred trips and eight thousand hours, two thousand of them at night.

He was the man who proposed the capital F in BlanchField.

He went to Boeing after the 1927 contract, and then to United. On 17 December 1932, on his usual Oakland–Reno run, radio contact was lost. After a two-day search the wreckage was found on Rocky Ridge near Danville, California. He had flown into fog and missed the top of the ridge by about ten feet.

Nineteen September

By 1927 the field was no longer really Reno's. On 1 July that year the Post Office handed the western half of the transcontinental route — contract air mail route 18, Chicago to San Francisco — to Boeing Air Transport, and Boeing took over the Reno operation as a tenant, leasing the municipal field and its hangar.

That tenancy is the hinge of everything that follows, and it is usually left out.

On the afternoon of 19 September 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew in from Sacramento and put the Spirit of St. Louis down on the field. He had crossed the Atlantic four months earlier and was in the middle of a national tour. Thousands of people came out to watch.

An eleven-year-old girl whose family knew the airport manager shook his hand, and the manager let the children photograph the aircraft. She told the story into a tape recorder sixty-three years later, which is how we know it.

Lindbergh rode into town with the mayor, followed by hundreds of residents, and spoke at Idlewild Park, promoting aviation and calling for better and larger airports. He left for Los Angeles the following morning.

He is also supposed to have said something sharper. In the standard account his aircraft rolled to a stop a few feet short of parked cars and a stone fence, and he told reporters that unless it was enlarged the field would never do for a commercial airport, and that runways needed to be at least twenty-five hundred feet.

Be careful with that. It descends from a single recollection passed to a researcher by one correspondent, and the correspondent cannot be identified. The most carefully sourced account of the visit reports no criticism of the field at all — only the speech urging bigger airports in general. That silence from the best source means something. The remark may well be genuine; it is not established, and it should not be set in quotation marks as Lindbergh's words on the evidence available.

What is established is the measurement. The 1929 federal airway bulletin recorded the field as two perpendicular unpaved runways of about 2,200 feet each, north–south and east–west, with several hangars on the northwest side. It had doubled its runways since 1920 and it was still short of twenty-five hundred feet.

And by then the argument was over, because Boeing had already left.

One Hundred and Twenty Acres

In July 1928, Boeing Air Transport bought its own landing field at Reno: a hundred and twenty acres about two and a half to three miles east of the one it had been renting.

The purchase was handled by a Boeing vice-president named Edward Willits Hubbard.

Hubbard is one of those figures who did a great deal and is remembered for almost none of it. Born in San Francisco on 3 January 1889, in Seattle from 1907, he was the first pupil at the Aviation School of the Northwest in 1915 and the first man in the Pacific Northwest licensed by the Aero Club of America. He joined the Boeing Airplane Company as a mechanic and became its test pilot. On 3 March 1919 he flew the first international air mail into the United States, Vancouver to Seattle, with William Boeing himself as his passenger and sixty pieces of Canadian mail in the back. He held the Seattle–Victoria mail contract from 1920 until he gave it up in 1927.

When the Post Office advertised the Chicago–San Francisco route in November 1926, it was Hubbard who talked a sceptical William Boeing into bidding for it, and Hubbard's work the bid was built on. He also pushed Boeing to stop buying aircraft and build its own mail planes, which produced the twenty-five Model 40s. In March 1927 he was made vice-president of Boeing Air Transport and sent to Salt Lake City to run operations, with the job of building the company a national system of its own airports.

Reno was one of them, and the reason Reno needed one is simple arithmetic. Boeing began flying the route on 1 July 1927 with the Model 40A: twelve hundred pounds of mail and two passengers. In August 1928 it put the Model 80 trimotor on the line, carrying twelve. Boeing bought the Reno ground the month before the trimotors arrived.

A company cannot lengthen a runway it does not own, on a municipal field hemmed in by a stone fence, parked cars, a golf club and an irrigation ditch. That, and not a remark to a reporter, is why Boeing left.

In November 1928 William Boeing came to Reno and christened the new field Hubbard Field, for the man who had bought it. The naming party arrived in a brand-new Model 80.

Hubbard was alive to hear about it. He had roughly a month left.

He died at Salt Lake City in December 1928, aged thirty-nine, of complications following emergency surgery for a stomach ulcer he had ignored while building Boeing's airport network. Accounts differ on the day — the 18th and the 28th both appear — so December 1928 is as precise as the record safely allows. He is buried in Seattle.

The field was not named as a memorial. It became one four weeks later.

Hubbard Field opened in 1929 and is still open. It has been called United Air Lines Airport from 1 June 1949, Reno Municipal from 1 December 1953, Reno International from 1970, Cannon International from 1979, and Reno–Tahoe International since 1994. Boeing's title passed to United in 1936, and United's to the City of Reno in the early 1950s — the city took over operation in 1953, which is when the name changed, and the outright purchase appears to have followed by the middle of the decade. The lease-and-then-buy sequence is why you will see both 1953 and 1955 in print.

Nobody has called it Hubbard Field officially since 1949.

But there is a street called Hubbard Way running between South Virginia and Kietzke, a mile and a half due west of the runways, and it has never been called anything else. No record of its naming has been found — not a plat note, not an ordinance, nothing. The honest statement is that the street almost certainly carries the field's name forward and that no document proving it has turned up.

Which leaves this district with something I have not seen anywhere else. Grove Street lines up with Reno's first airport. Hubbard Way carries the name of its second. Four blocks apart, pointing in opposite directions, one generation between them.

How an Airport Becomes a Golf Course

The story everybody tells is that Reno gave up its airport for a golf course. It is a good story and it is not what happened.

Here is the sequence, and the dates do the work.

Boeing left for its own field in 1928. The old field was still a charted, hangared aerodrome in 1929, and Reno kept it. But the airline was gone, and the federal weather office — which follows the commercial traffic — had opened a station at Hubbard Field by 8 January 1931. From that point there was no functional argument for two airports two and a half miles apart in a city of twenty thousand people.

In 1933 the Washoe County commissioners deeded the county's half-ownership of the field to the City of Reno at no charge. Note the direction: the county gave its half away.

In May 1935, federal relief labour broke ground on a golf course. On 15 August 1935 the hangar was dismantled; the pieces were carted to the United Airlines field and stored, and what became of them is not recorded. By December 1935 the field no longer appeared on the Reno sectional chart, which is a cartographic death certificate. The course was finished in October 1936 and it is called the Washoe County Golf Course, which is a peculiar name for land the county had given away three years earlier.

So: Reno did not trade an airport for a recreation project. Reno lost its airline to a privately built competitor, held a redundant municipal property for five years, and then disposed of it in the depth of the Depression using federal relief labour. That is a duller sentence and a truer one, and it is the same story as a hundred other American towns in 1935.

No organised opposition appears in any account. That is a negative finding rather than proof there was none.

Then the line itself was cut. Between 1936 and 1938 the Works Progress Administration built Virginia Lake — thirty and a half acres, still owned by the City of Reno — as a recreation site and a flood-control and irrigation reservoir. It sits directly across the alignment, between South Virginia Street and the old field.

Which is why Grove Street stops where it does. East of South Virginia it runs its four blocks to Kietzke. West of South Virginia it manages a single block of casino back offices and then it is finished, because one New Deal project put a lake across the road to the airport that another New Deal project had just finished burying.

What Is Left

Of the field itself: nothing. No hangar, no runway, no beacon base, no fence. The ground is the Washoe County Golf Course, a plaque put up by the Air Mail Pioneers stands near the tennis centre on Plumas Street, and that is the whole of it.

Of the street: Grove Street, running down the extended axis of a runway that stopped existing ninety-one years ago, carrying a childcare playground and a casino's accounting department.

And then there is the arrow.

When the airway was lit for night flying, the government built a chain of beacons across the country: fifty-foot steel towers carrying rotating lights of five thousand candlepower that flashed every ten seconds and blinked a Morse identifier, each tower standing on a concrete arrow fifty to seventy feet long, painted yellow, pointing at the next station in the sequence. Pilots followed them the way you follow a line of streetlights.

The one west of Reno is at Mogul, on a bluff above what is now Interstate 80, on land owned by the City of Reno. Its beacon, lit in 1928, was the first airway beacon in Nevada. The fifty-one-foot tower is gone. The service building is gone. The light is gone.

The arrow is still there. Fifty-seven feet of concrete, badly cracked, broken into something like eighteen pieces, tail toward Boomtown.

Its head is on a bearing of about eighty-three degrees, which is to say it is pointing, as it has pointed since 1928, directly at the eleventh hole of a golf course.

Resources & Further Reading

The route's opening date, the start of night service on 1 July 1924, the design of the lighted airway and the figure of thirty-four pilot deaths between 1918 and 1927 are from the United States Postal Service's own published history of air mail and its official roster of air mail pilots, both federal public-domain documents; the roster is what confirms Blanchfield's service dates and his Elko and Reno assignment. The 1920 site-selection record — Jensen Field, the Plumas Street land, the condemnation suits in the Berrum tract, the federal hangar specification — comes from contemporary Reno Evening Gazette items of May and August 1920. The 1921 pilot instructions, the hangar's construction and its counterweighted door, the Strauss attribution, the dedication of 18 April 1921 and the dismantling of 15 August 1935 descend from a single compiled account of the field, which cites Reno Gazette-Journal retrospectives of 7 November 1998 and 10 March 2013; they should be read as one source, not several. The 1921 parcel map, the Southside Ditch, the 1929 federal airway bulletin measurements, the 1933 conveyance and the December 1935 sectional chart are from a survey of abandoned and little-known airfields. The renaming of 11 August 1924, the capital F, the circumstances of Blanchfield's death and the shamrock tradition are documented in a 2024 article in the quarterly of a Reno historical preservation society, which is the best-sourced material in the file. Lindbergh's arrival date is fixed by his own flight log. Hubbard's career, the July 1928 purchase and the November 1928 christening rest on a compiled biography drawing on the only book-length study of him. Street alignments, latitudes, parcel acreages, ownership and the extent of Virginia Lake are from the Washoe County Assessor's real property records and the county parcel layer, pulled October 2026.

Three things in this article are probable rather than proven, and are flagged where they appear: that Joseph Strauss's firm designed the hangar, which rests on one account; that Lindbergh criticised the field in the words usually given, which rests on one unidentified recollection and is contradicted by silence in the best account of the visit; and that Grove Street was the road to the field, for which the evidence is the alignment and nothing else. One further gap is worth naming: no document records the naming of Hubbard Way.

• Airmail — United States Postal Service — the federal history. Public domain. Route dates, the lighted airway, the beacon spacing, the fatality total.
• List of Airmail Pilots — United States Postal Service — every pilot, with service dates and stations. Blanchfield, Boggs, Vance, Sharpnack, Winslow and the rest.
• Of Airmail and Shamrocks — FootPrints, Summer 2024 — the Blanchfield story and the renaming, with the council date and the capital F. The best single document here.
• Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields: Northwestern Nevada — the 1921 parcel map, the 1929 airway bulletin, the 1933 conveyance, the 1935 chart.
• Reno Air Mail Field / Blanch Field — Arrows Across America — the hangar, the door, the counterweight, the Strauss attribution, the coordinates.
• Site 18, Mogul — Arrows Across America — the arrow above the interstate, the first airway beacon in Nevada, and where it points.
• Lindbergh's flight log — Sacramento to Reno, 19 September 1927; Reno to Los Angeles, the 20th.
• When Lucky Lindy Came To Reno — the crowd, the handshake, the Idlewild Park speech, and Boeing's tenancy.
• Edward Willits Hubbard — the 1919 international mail flight, the CAM 18 bid, the July 1928 Reno purchase, the November 1928 christening.
• Nevada aviation history — Sparks Heritage Museum — the 1920 council record, the 1919 hangar, the federal specification.
• Sierra Air Mail Pilots — the Motor Macs, the rebuilt Liberty engines, the Black Rock strip, the wrecks left in the mountains.
• Clare Vance, Sierra pilot — the first pouch over the Sierra by moonlight, and Rocky Ridge.
• Site of Reno Air Mail Field — historical marker — the plaque on Plumas Street, and its coordinates.
• National Weather Service Reno — office history — the federal weather station opening at Hubbard Field on 8 January 1931, and the airport's chain of official names.

Hero image: United States Post Office Department mail plane with experimental night-flying radio equipment, Bolling Field, 2 August 1922. Harris & Ewing, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Harris & Ewing Collection, LC-DIG-hec-42365. No known restrictions on publication.