Elko, Nevada
Nevada
The first commercial airmail flight in America ended its run in Elko, Nevada.
On April sixth, nineteen twenty-six, a pilot named Leon Cuddeback flew a load of mail out of Pasco, Washington, and pointed south. The route ran four hundred and eighty-seven miles. He set down briefly in Boise to pick up more sacks, then carried on to a patch of northern Nevada ground that would become Elko Regional Airport. That was the first commercial airmail flight in the United States. It happened because Congress had passed the Kelly Act the year before, letting the Post Office hire private airlines to run the feeder routes that fed the main transcontinental line. Elko was the far end of one of those feeders. The town was already used to being the end of a line. Settlers established it in eighteen sixty-eight, at the point where the Central Pacific Railroad's tracks stopped. The crews moved on. Elko stayed, and sold supplies to ranchers and miners.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
The first commercial airmail flight in the United States was on the 487-mile (784 km) Airmail Route #5 from Pasco, Washington, to what would become Elko Regional Airport on April 6, 1926.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Carlin Tunnel 16.5 mi A passenger train derailed at the bridges here in 1939, killing twenty-four people, and investigators ruled it deliberate sabotage that was never solved.
- Palisade, Nevada 28.7 mi A Nevada railroad town staged fake gunfights for arriving trains, and nobody outside the town knew it was theater.
- Beowawe, Nevada 42.2 mi North America's second largest geyser field, after Yellowstone, was drilled out of existence here in a single year.