First flights: the Driving Park, 1910

1910 — 1911

The city's first flying ground was a racetrack: Before Fort Wayne had anything called an airport it had the Driving Park, the fairgrounds and horse-racing oval on the city's northeast side, at what is now the Forest Park Boulevard country. Airplanes arrived there as fairground attractions, shipped in crates and assembled in public. In the fall of 1910 the Glenn Curtiss exhibition team came to town — a News-Sentinel history records the planes arriving by rail, carted out to the park and put together as part of the show — and on 23 October 1910, during that meet, Blanche Stuart Scott flew solo across the Driving Association's field. The Journal-Gazette of 24 October 1910 covered the flight, and the History Center's account states what it was: the first solo public flight by a woman in America, made before a crowd the park's histories put in the thousands. The city's own boy was watching and building. Art Smith, twenty years old, had been constructing a Curtiss-type biplane since early 1910 on $1,800 his parents raised by mortgaging their home; he had gone to Indianapolis in June 1910 to see the Wright team's exhibition, and he was at the Driving Park that October to watch the Curtiss men. His own machine was finished in January, and the News-Sentinel's history puts his first attempt on 17 January — snow on the ground, a takeoff run on two bicycle wheels, a rise, and a plunge of forty feet into the park turf, the first of the crashes that made him famous as "the Smash-Up Kid." The date of that first attempt is one the published record does not hold still: the biographical account built on his mother's scrapbook puts the boys finishing the machine on 17 January 1910 and testing it the next morning at the circus grounds between Washington Boulevard and Maumee Avenue — the ground that is now Memorial Park — a full year earlier in the calendar. This entry prints both datings rather than choosing; what neither account disputes is the substance of the story: Fort Wayne's first flights were made off fairgrounds and circus lots, in front of whoever cared to stand in the cold and watch.

Sources:

1. The News-Sentinel, Summit City History / Cityscapes history series (egen.fortwayne.com) — the Driving Park exhibition record, the Curtiss team's 1910 visit, and the "Bird Boy" profile dating Smith's first attempt to 17 January 1911 at the Driving Park.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), 1910–1919 Timeline of Allen County and the Driving Park page — the Journal-Gazette of 24 October 1910 on Blanche Scott's flight of 23 October 1910; the History Center's Notes & Queries account (Mark Meyer) of the Driving Park.
3. Rachel Sherwood Roberts, "The Smash-Up Kid: Fort Wayne Aviator Art Smith," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (Indiana Historical Society, fall 1998), via the Air Mail Pioneers site — the scrapbook-based dating of the first machine to January 1910 and the Memorial Park circus grounds.