A crowd estimated at more than 3,500 greeted the first transcontinental airmail flight when it landed amid gathering dusk of July 1, 1924, at Smith Field, now Iowa City Municipal Airport.

Bob Hibbs Local Historian

Among other mail on its New York to San Francisco route, the plane carried a letter from the Merchants Association of New York for the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce.

The event was an exciting spectacle during the Roaring Twenties amid widespread fascination with flight. It drew spectators for an expected night landing on the newly-lighted field. However, the plane arrived nearly an hour early in twilight as an eight-million candle power beacon rotated atop a new 50-foot tower.

A 500 million candle power unit was on standby for use during fog and storms.

The event wasn't the first local airmail flight, nor was it at the first local airfield.

Markers and beacons light the Iowa City airstrip in 1923 as one of 34 original refueling and mail transfer stops on U.S. airmail flights between New York and San Francisco. Special to the Press-Citizen

Local flight took off Oct. 13, 1910, from a 40-acre Johnson County fairgrounds, now the Morningside Drive neighborhood west of current Iowa City High School.

The demonstration by St. Louis pilot Tom Baldwin was among the first airplane flights in Iowa. It followed a May flight at Burlington and two at Sioux City in June, all in 1910.

Flying on a windy day above a crowd of more than 10,000, Baldwin's plane skipped off a treetop near the current site of City High's Statue of Liberty monument and crashed. He escaped with minor scratches.

During the subsequent decade, local flights remained rare, and shifted to a quarter-mile square pasture owned by W.J. Benjamin, part of the current airport site. The farm became established as the local airport with use on Jan. 8, 1920, as a fuel stop for the first day-time airmail flight from Chicago to Omaha.

Iowa City became legendary with the Jan. 9 return flight when Iowa City merchant Robert Carson shipped a 10-pound pig to Chicago friend and hotel manager John Burke. The publicity stunt prompted widespread reports of Burke walking his "Airmail Pig" on Chicago's lakefront.

Before artificial lights arrived locally in 1924 and decades before flight radios, pilots arriving at night would buzz the city and airfield, in effect requesting bonfires to mark the field.

The late Claude Higginbotham, known to his long-time barber trade as Hicks and an uncle to this reporter's wife, recalled racing to the airport as part of a team to assist night-arriving and weather-affected planes. Kerosene and wood supplies made quick infernos as beacons.

The pioneer 1920 airmail flight through Iowa City was piloted by Walter J. Smith, whose death in an airplane crash two years after the historic flight prompted naming the Iowa City field for him.

Voters approved 1929 bonds to buy and improve Smith Field as a municipal airport.

Next Saturday: The Mechanics Academy incubator.

Bob Hibbs collects local postcards and other historic ephemera and researches history related to them. He can be reached at 338-3175 or at hibbs@mchsi.com.