History

Monograph by Paul Bodin, Emeritus Research Professor; Nissa Stupakoff, Undergraduate Research Assistant; and Mickey Cassar, Field Engineer, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (contains links for further exploration). The development of what we recognize today as the Quillayute Prairie resulted from millions of years of geologic processes, some quite widespread and regional, and some much more localized. Many of the rocks that comprise the Olympic Peninsula originated as oceanic seafloor far away to the west.

The Quileute Indians once occupied lands throughout the interior West End, including the area of Forks. Their territory stretched north from La Push at the mouth of the Quillayute River (the tribe and river spellings differ) to adjoin Ozette and Makah lands, then east to the headwaters of the Soleduck and Hoh rivers, and south to the Quinault River. The Quileutes thought themselves wronged by the 1855 and 1856 treaties that ceded their territory, not realizing they had signed away their traditional lands. A reservation was eventually created around the village of La Push in 1889, the same year Washington became a state. And though the remote area experienced little early pressure from white settlement, in 1889, settler Daniel Pullen burned down the entire village while the villagers were picking hops in Puget Sound. They returned to find nothing of their longhouses, tools, artwork, or ceremonial items. This was an episode in a land dispute later decided in favor of the Quileutes,

Following WWI, the town of Forks remained a small community surrounded by prairie homesteads and dense forests. Throughout the 1920s, area logging companies-built hundreds of miles of rail in order to transport timber for milling. But the completion of the Olympic Loop Highway in 1931 proved to be an economic boon for Forks. Now, with reliable access to outside markets, area logging continued to grow.

(Excerpt from City of Forks Quillayute Airport Master Plan, Drayton Archeology Report): The beginnings of military aviation in the United States can be traced to the American Civil War with the utilization of air balloons for reconnaissance and supply transport. Heavier than air flight began in the late 1890s when Samuel Pierpont Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, designed a steam-powered tandem-winged machine called an “aerodrome” (Kindy 2021). Once Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully developed the airplane into a practical flying machine, military application of the new technology was not far behind.

(Excerpted from "WWII in Clallam County," by Lonnie Archibald) According to information acquired by Forks High school and UW graduate and historian Harvey Green it was nearly a year before the Japanese attacked Pear Harbor, the tensions between the U.S. and Japan heightened and the United States began a search for suitable sites to construct airfields.

In the early 1960s, NAAS Quillayute was transferred to the General Services Administration for disposal without restriction. Most of the property was acquired by the State of Washington in 1962 for us as “an emergency landing field.” At that time, the Federal Government transferred approximately 750 acres of the facility to the State of Washington (i.e., the airfield, etc.), with the remaining 450  acres being deeded and/or sold to between the Quillayute Valley School District and private parties. Upon its transfer the facility became known as the Quillayute State Airport.