Flying by the Army Air
Service began in 1921 when a forest patrol base was established.
Reserve flyers from the area trained with the 321st Observation
Squadron from 1923 until 1941, when the unit was called to
active duty. Lt. Oakley Kelly, who along with Lt. John McCready,
made the first non-stop transcontinental flight in 1923,
commanded the unit from 1924 until 1928. Kelly was instrumental
in the establishment of the adjacent commercial field. These two
fields later joined and became known as Pearson Airpark. The
original West Coast airmail service stopped at Pearson. Both
Pacific Air Transport and Varney Airlines used the field. They
later joined with two other airlines to become United Airlines.
Captain Carlton Bond
commanded the squadron form 1929 to 1933 and again from 1938
until 1940. He has been immortalized by a statue dedicated to
him, which is displayed at the front entrance to the Pearson Air
Museum.
Pearson Field has been used
and visited by a number of leading aviators. Tex Rankin had a
flight operation and school here on several occasions. Charles
Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, T. Claude Ryan,
and more recently, Chuck Yeager, the first man to exceed the
speed of sound in an aircraft, have visited Pearson Field.
Pearson Field was also the last stopover in the Army's epochal
Round-the-World flight in 1924. Five years later, in 1929, the
aircraft, "Land of the Soviets", an ANT-4, touched down here
during its around the world flight.
On 20 June 1937, the entire
world became focused on Vancouver, USA, and Pearson Field, when
the Soviet's ANT-25 completed its transpolar flight from Moscow,
USSR, to Vancouver, Washington, in 63 hours and 16 minutes. The
monument commemorating that flight is on display just west of
the museum and was the first monument to commemorate a Russian
accomplishment on US soil.
In 1912, Silas Cristofferson,
after flying for only one year, took off from the roof of the
Multnomah Hotel in Portland and landed at Pearson. In September
of 1995, Tom Murphy, assisted by the Pearson Field Historical
Society, under the auspices of the "One Place Across Time"
committee, duplicated the flight that Oregon's newspapers had
said in 1937, "would never be done again". Both pilots used a
Curtiss Pusher.
During WWII, the field housed
Italian prisoners of war.
The combination of Officers' Row, the O.O
Howard House, the US Army's Vancouver Barracks, (established in
1849 and in continuous use since), Fort Vancouver (home of the
British Hudson's Bay Company from 1825 until 1850) and Pearson
Field with the Pearson Air Museum has made Vancouver, USA, an
important historical stop in the Northwest.
Pearson Field continues to serve the
greater Vancouver-Portland area as an important general aviation
center. The Pearson Field Historical Society at the Jack Murdock
Aviation Center is dedicated to preserving the rich aviation
history of historic Pearson Field.
