Piper Aircraft and the J-3 Cub

The little yellow airplane that taught America to fly was built here in Lock Haven. Piper Aircraft Corporation, founded as Taylor Brothers in nineteen twenty-seven, moved to this site in nineteen thirty-seven under William T. Piper, who had bought its assets after the company failed and gave it his name. At its peak the factory employed more than two thousand people and had turned out nearly seventy-seven thousand general aviation aircraft.

The most famous was the J-three Cub, Piper's most popular model, with roughly twenty thousand built here. During World War Two, the military adapted the Cub into the L-four Grasshopper, a spotter and liaison plane flown over every major theater of the war. Generals including Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton used Grasshoppers to observe battlefields. The plane that started as a bargain trainer ended up helping win a world war.