Quonset is an Algonquian word for the peninsula. In 1941 the Navy commissioned an air station on it, and a New York firm invented the most-deployed building of the twentieth century.
A Pirep featured story · KOQU Quonset State, North Kingstown, RI
Quonset is an Algonquian word. It means "small, long place." It was the name an indigenous community gave to a peninsula on Narragansett Bay in what is now Rhode Island. In late March 1941, in a great hurry, the U.S. Navy commissioned an air station on that peninsula and a New York construction firm started designing a building.
The base was Naval Air Station Quonset Point, commissioned July 12, 1941, on what had been a small state militia camp. The Navy needed a major North Atlantic carrier-aviation base, and quickly. By the end of the year, Quonset Point was running primary flight training for thousands of Navy pilots, and by 1942 it was the East Coast home of carrier air groups headed for the war. One of the officers who came through basic training here in 1942 was a young Whittier College graduate named Richard Nixon.
The building was the Quonset hut. Peter Dejongh, an engineer, and Otto Brandenberger, an architect, both of the George A. Fuller Company, drew up the design at Quonset Point in two months. The Navy asked for a structure light, fast to build, shippable in panels, and able to stand up to weather anywhere from Iceland to Guadalcanal. Dejongh and Brandenberger gave them a sixteen-by-thirty-six-foot half-cylinder of corrugated steel over arched ribs, with a tongue-and-groove plywood floor and a Masonite inner lining. Ten unskilled laborers could put one up in a day. The first Quonset huts were shipped to Britain under Lend-Lease in June 1941. By the end of the war, more than 150,000 had been built and deployed everywhere the U.S. military went.
The Navy ran Quonset Point for thirty-three years. P-2 Neptune patrol squadrons hunted Atlantic submarines from here through the Cold War. Carrier air groups deployed and returned. The post-Vietnam budget killed the air station; it was deactivated on June 28, 1974. The runways and most of the buildings stayed. The 143d Airlift Wing of the Rhode Island Air National Guard moved in from T.F. Green in the mid-1980s and still operates C-130J Hercules out of here. The Rhode Island Army Guard runs UH-60 Black Hawks from an adjacent ramp. The original 7,504-foot runway 16/34, laid for fully loaded carrier aircraft, is still the long one.
KOQU sits on Narragansett Bay between Boston and New York, eighteen miles south of Providence. Class D field, tower closes on Mondays. The airfield where the most-deployed building of the twentieth century was invented.