In 1909 Asa Candler's son built a two-mile speedway outside Atlanta to compete with Indianapolis. It failed in a single season. Sixteen years later the city leased the abandoned track for a dollar and turned it into the airport that, a century on, is the busiest in the world.
A Pirep featured story · KATL Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Atlanta, GA
In 1909, Asa Candler Sr., the Atlanta pharmacist who had acquired the Coca-Cola formula for around $2,300 and built it into a fortune, funded a project for his son Asa "Buddie" Candler Jr.: a two-mile hard-clay automobile racetrack south of the city, designed to compete directly with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which had opened just months earlier. The Atlanta Speedway cost $400,000. Opening day on November 9, 1909, drew every famous racer in America and broke attendance records; track records fell all weekend.
Then it fell apart. Buddie Candler proved a difficult partner, fought with his backers, and the Speedway closed after a single season. The two-mile oval and grandstands sat abandoned through World War I. By the 1920s, the infield was being used as an informal landing strip by a barnstormer named Beeler Blevins, who flew passenger rides and aerial photography from the dirt.
In 1925, Atlanta Mayor Walter Sims assigned a 35-year-old city alderman named William B. Hartsfield to find Atlanta a municipal airport. When Hartsfield and his committee toured the abandoned Speedway with Blevins, they discovered the runway problem was already half-solved. On April 16, 1925, the city signed a five-year lease with the Candler family for the 287 acres, rent-free, with an option to buy for $100,000. As part of the deal the field was renamed Candler Field, in Hartsfield's open hope that the family would eventually donate the land outright. They did not; the city bought it in 1929 for $94,400.
The first commercial flight into Candler Field landed on September 15, 1926, a Florida Airways mail plane from Jacksonville. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh visited in the Spirit of St. Louis and got a hero's welcome. Pitcairn Aviation began service in 1928 and became Eastern Air Lines; Delta Air Service began service in 1930 and became Delta Air Lines. Both made Atlanta their hub. The airport became Atlanta Municipal in 1929, then Atlanta Army Airfield during World War II, when it doubled in size and set a single-day record of 1,700 operations, then William B. Hartsfield Atlanta Airport in 1971, then Hartsfield-Jackson in 2003 after Maynard Jackson, the city's first Black mayor.
In 2024 the airport that started on Buddie Candler's failed racetrack handled 108.1 million passengers, the most of any airport in the world.