Twelve hundred acres east of Baltimore. The China Clipper, the B-26 Marauder, the Martin Mars — built by the same man whose Omaha plant built Enola Gay.
A Pirep featured story · KMTN Martin State, Middle River, MD
In 1915, a 29-year-old aviator from Kansas named Glenn Martin showed up on a Paramount Pictures set in Los Angeles to fly the airplane for a Mary Pickford comedy called A Girl of Yesterday. The director offered him a small acting role — a pilot who, in one scene, was to kiss the leading lady. Martin refused: "my mother would not like it." The producer Adolph Zukor talked him into it. Martin used the publicity to advertise his flying school and his struggling aircraft company.
Fourteen years later, that company bought 1,260 acres of farmland east of Baltimore. The Glenn L. Martin Company built itself a plant and an airfield there in 1929. By the early 1930s the place was producing the Martin B-10, the first all-metal monoplane bomber accepted into U.S. military service — an airplane so capable that its introduction won Martin a Collier Trophy. By the late 1930s he was building the Pan American China Clipper, the long-range flying boat that crossed the Pacific for the first time on a commercial schedule. By 1942 the plant was producing B-26 Marauders for the European theater, PBM Mariners for Atlantic anti-submarine patrol, and the gigantic Martin Mars — the largest flying boat ever built for the U.S. military.
The same architectural firm, Albert Kahn Associates of Detroit, designed both the Middle River plant and the Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant at Offutt Field in Nebraska, where the Enola Gay and Bockscar were assembled.
Martin Marietta sold 747 acres of the airfield to the State of Maryland on September 20, 1975, after the post-Vietnam contraction killed off Cold War aircraft programs. The state renamed it Martin State Airport in 1985. The original administration building is still on the field. The Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum, founded in 1990, sits in one of the original hangars at the southeast corner. The single runway 15/33, resurfaced and modernized under a $32 million state contract awarded in 2024, runs along the same line Martin paced off in 1929.
The 175th Wing of the Maryland Air National Guard still operates from the northwest corner, on Warfield Air National Guard Base. The wing transitioned out of fixed-wing flying in 2025 and into cyber and space missions, ending nearly a century of military aircraft operations at Glenn Martin's airfield.