Mines Field to LAX: The Barley Farm That Became the World's Airport

On October first, nineteen twenty-eight, the city of Los Angeles opened a municipal airport on six hundred forty acres of leased barley farmland in what is now El Segundo. The land had been part of the Rancho Sausal Redondo, a Mexican-era land grant whose name means the round grove of willows. The city's real estate broker for the deal was a man named William Mines. The airport was named Mines Field.

The nineteen twenty-eight National Air Races were its debut. The runway was two thousand feet long. There was hangar space for forty planes. It was modest in every way, precisely the kind of facility that is difficult to imagine becoming one of the five busiest airports on Earth.

The city purchased the land outright in nineteen thirty-seven. The international terminal went up in the early nineteen sixties. Each decade after that brought larger planes, longer runways, more terminals, more traffic, more of everything until the barley fields were entirely abstract, present only in memory and in the name of the refinery town next door.

El Segundo means the second in Spanish. Standard Oil's second California refinery opened there in nineteen eleven and is still operating today. The first thing was the barley. Then it was the oil. Then it was the aviation fuel for planes that burn the same chemistry the oil refiners invented a century ago. The landscape tells you what it is if you pay attention to the names.