In 1903 a Yale dropout named William Boeing came to Seattle to make money in timber. By 1928 the voters of King County had taxed themselves nearly a million dollars to build a municipal airport and named it after him.
A Pirep featured story · KBFI Boeing Field / King County International, Seattle, WA
In the same year the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, a 22-year-old who had just left Yale moved to Seattle to enter the timber business. William E. Boeing made his first money in the lumber yards of the Pacific Northwest. In 1910 he traveled to Los Angeles to attend the country's first international air meet and came home changed. Five years later he was building seaplanes in a hangar on Lake Union. In 1916 he founded Pacific Aero Products, renamed Boeing Airplane Company the next year, headquartered in a converted shipyard on the Duwamish River south of Seattle that the workers called the Red Barn.
The flat land just east of the Red Barn had been a horse-racing complex called The Meadows since 1902 — seating for 10,000 spectators, stables for 1,000 horses, Seattle's first automobile race in 1905, and the city's first powered-airplane demonstration in 1910, when the barnstormer Charles Hamilton crashed into a pond on day one in front of 20,000 paying spectators and flew again the next day to satisfied applause. By the 1920s The Meadows had become an informal airstrip used by Boeing for testing.
In 1928 the voters of King County did something unusual. They approved a $950,000 bond to buy The Meadows and turn it into the first municipal airport in the Pacific Northwest, and they named it after a private citizen who was still alive: Boeing Field. More than 50,000 people attended the dedication on July 26, 1928. The Boeing Model 80 trimotor made its first flight from the new field the next day. Bill Boeing wrote a humble thank-you letter to the commissioners. "I am more deeply sensitive of the great honor," he told them, "because I believe that flight and air transportation are going to take a more important part in our civic and national progress than we are able to foresee today."
Through the 1930s, Boeing Field was Seattle's only commercial passenger airport. United Airlines began as a merger of two carriers that flew out of it. During World War II, the field was taken over by the government and Boeing converted to round-the-clock production of B-17s and B-29s. When Sea-Tac opened in 1944, Boeing Field became what it remains today: one of the busiest single-runway general aviation airports in the country, the field where Boeing test-flies and delivers new aircraft, and the home of the Museum of Flight on its southwest corner — built on the exact ground where The Meadows once stood. The first 747 ever built, City of Everett, is parked there now. Pilots fly into KBFI to see it.