Major Albert Lambert, on behalf of the Missouri Aeronautical Society of which he was a member, leased a field northwest of downtown St. Louis on this date in 1920. The area in which the field was situated was already an incubator in the burgeoning world of aviation. Just nearby the land was an area known as Kinloch Field. The site had been host to a number of balloon launches beginning in the 1890s, in addition to being the place where a president had taken to the sky for the very first time (Theodore Roosevelt in 1910) and the first parachute jump from a plane (Albert Berry in 1912). Kinloch had closed and had its grandstand demolished in 1912.
Given the area’s history, the Missouri Aeronautical Society thought the site was an appropriate place to put together a more permanent airfield. After leasing the land Lambert began clearing what had once been cornfields into an airfield at his own expense. Then in 1925, he bought the land outright and developed it into a hub for commercial aviation. Missourians know the field today at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, and if you’ve flown out of Missouri there’s a decent chance it was from the same strip leased by Lambert all those years ago.
Today, Lambert sees 259 daily departures and serves sixteen million passengers per year. The airport continued playing a role in the history of aviation when Charles Lindbergh, who got his start as a mail carrier flying out of Lambert Field, stopped there on his way to and from his historic transatlantic flight in his plane The Spirit of St. Louis. A replica of the plane hangs in the airport to this day.
