Boeing Field and the Red Barn: Where Aviation Began in the Pacific Northwest
Near Bremerton, Washington
William Boeing was a timber heir from a wealthy Detroit family who had come to Seattle to work in the lumber business and found himself, in nineteen fifteen, obsessed with airplanes. He took flying lessons from Glenn Martin in California, returned to Seattle, bought a Heath seaplane, and decided it was inferior to what he could build himself. He had no background in aviation manufacturing. He had capital, access to Pacific Northwest timber and skilled woodworkers, and a useful lack of certainty about what was impossible.
He filed papers for the Pacific Aero Products Company in nineteen sixteen. His first factory was a boat-building shed on the bank of the Duwamish River, a low wooden structure that had been used to build pleasure craft and was now, somewhat improbably, being converted to build flying machines. The shed became known as the Red Barn. Boeing produced seaplanes for the United States Navy during World War One, renamed the company the Boeing Airplane Company in nineteen seventeen, and began a relationship between the Duwamish River corridor and military aviation that would define the Pacific Northwest for the next century.
The aircraft that followed from that shed were built by a workforce that grew to four thousand during World War One, peaked at forty thousand during World War Two, and reached one hundred thousand at the height of the Cold War jet age. The B-seventeen Flying Fortress was built here. The B-twenty-nine that ended the war in the Pacific. The B-fifty-two that defined the Cold War. The seven thirty-seven, still the world's most widely flown commercial aircraft. The seven forty-seven, which redefined mass air travel. Each of them traceable back to a boat-building shed on the Duwamish River.
The Red Barn was moved to the Museum of Flight campus and restored. It is a National Historic Landmark. The Duwamish River it originally faced is now a federal Superfund site, contaminated by more than a century of heavy industrial use. Boeing is one of the parties responsible for the cleanup. The river the company started on is part of what it is cleaning up now.
