Paine Field: The WPA Airport That Became Boeing Country
Near Woodinville, Washington
Paine Field was built in nineteen thirty-six with New Deal money as one of ten planned super airports across the country. But World War Two changed its purpose before it ever handled a commercial flight. In the spring of nineteen forty-one, the Army Air Corps took over the field to protect the nearby Boeing plant and the Bremerton shipyards, and renamed it in honor of Second Lieutenant Topliff Olin Paine, a local World War One pilot who died in nineteen twenty-two.
After the war the field returned to civilian hands, and in nineteen sixty-six Boeing chose adjacent land to build its enormous seven forty-seven assembly plant, the largest building by volume on earth. Paine Field finally opened commercial passenger service in twenty nineteen, eighty-three years after the Works Progress Administration first broke ground here.
