Museum of Flight: Boeing's Red Barn and the World's Aviation Attic

The red wooden building on the south end of Boeing Field is not a replica or a reconstruction. It is the actual structure where Boeing started. The Red Barn, as it is known, was built in nineteen oh nine as a boat-building facility by a man named Edward Heath. William Boeing acquired it in nineteen ten. Six years later, on July fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, Boeing incorporated the Pacific Aero Products Company in that building and began assembling his first airplanes, a pair of floatplanes called the B and W seaplanes, built with the help of Navy engineer George Conrad Westervelt.

The company was renamed the Boeing Airplane Company the following year. The Red Barn served as headquarters and primary manufacturing site until Boeing Plant Two opened in nineteen thirty-six. For two decades, this modest two-story barn was the nerve center of what would become one of the most consequential industrial enterprises in American history.

The barn was moved to its current location in the nineteen seventies to anchor what became the Museum of Flight. Today it is the oldest airplane manufacturing facility in the United States, preserved as a working exhibit with original machinery and period artifacts showing how Boeing's first aircraft were actually built.

The museum that grew up around it now holds more than one hundred thirty aircraft and spacecraft. The six-story Great Gallery suspends vintage military jets and commercial airliners from the ceiling at impossible angles. Outside, the Aviation Pavilion shelters a Concorde, a British Airways supersonic liner, alongside military aircraft and the prototype Boeing seven forty-seven. A full-scale Space Shuttle trainer and the first Air Force One round out the collection.

It is the largest independent air and space museum in the world. And at the center of it, still, is that red barn where it all began in nineteen sixteen.