Boston Logan sits on what used to be three separate islands in Boston Harbor. Between 1944 and 1949, Massachusetts filled them in.
A Pirep featured story · KBOS Boston-Logan International, Boston, MA
When the Boston Air Port opened at Jeffries Point in East Boston on September 8, 1923, it occupied a few hundred acres of grass on a Boston Harbor peninsula. The Army Air Corps used it for mail. The Massachusetts National Guard kept a few biplanes there. The first scheduled passenger flight arrived in 1927 from New York on Colonial Air Transport, operated by a 28-year-old named Juan Trippe who would later found Pan American Airways.
In 1943 the Massachusetts state legislature renamed the field for Major General Edward Lawrence Logan, who had died four years earlier. Logan was the son of Irish immigrants from Galway. He had graduated from Boston Latin and Harvard, enlisted in the 9th Massachusetts Irish Regiment during the Spanish-American War, and risen to command the 26th "Yankee" Division of the Massachusetts National Guard after World War I. He had never served in aviation. The legislature wanted to honor a Boston man, and the airport was Boston's airport, so they put his name on it.
What happened next was one of the strangest pieces of municipal geography in twentieth-century Boston. Three islands clustered around the East Boston peninsula. Apple Island had grown apples since the 1700s. Noddle's Island had been the site of a Revolutionary War battle. Governor's Island had a fort and a Civil War-era hospital. Between 1944 and 1949, the Commonwealth filled in the channels separating those three islands from East Boston and from each other. The fill came from dredged harbor mud, demolished East Boston neighborhoods, and the cores of the islands themselves. Nearly two thousand acres of new earth went into Boston Harbor.
By 1950 the three islands had vanished into a single continuous airfield. The geography of Boston Harbor had not changed that much in three hundred years of European settlement. It changed in five years to make room for the new long-range airliners. Logan today covers 2,384 acres. Almost everything beyond the original Jeffries Point peninsula is fill — over the islands, over the channels, over the mudflats.