Drayton Report Mansfield Family (From: https://centurywest.com/quillayute-amp/)
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.
Beginning in the 1930s, using funds provided by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Public Works Administration (PWA), a number of Washington communities built or purchased existing airports -- in large part to accommodate postal service flights. .
The Forks Airport was developed sometime between the1920s to 1930s (Fleck 2021). Unlike other small airports of its era, the airfield at Forks was built using private money. Primary funding came from the Mansfield family, the area leader in hops cultivation.
In the early 1940s, the United States Navy inspected the airfield for potential development due to increasing tensions in Europe and Japan. When the existing Forks Airport was deemed incapable of meeting the Navy’s needs, the Quillayute Prairie was selected as the site of a new Naval airfield.
After choosing an area of more than 500-acres, the Navy sought to acquire the necessary land by “taking” or eminent domain. A U.S. District court ruled in favor of the Navy, which resulted in the forcible removal of the existing family farms on the prairie, including that of the Mansfields.
The City of Forks was soon inundated with Navy personnel and their families. When completed, U.S. Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Quillayute brought nearly 2,500 Navy men with a few miles of the town. Following the end of hostilities in the Pacific, the Navy cannibalized the facility before eventually turning it over to the State of Washington.
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