Our feature OKI Wanna Know is your chance to ask that question that's been flying around your brain, but you didn't know where to find the answer. This week, we investigate a strip of land near Winton Woods, with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
In our last edition of OKI Wanna Know, we fielded a couple of queries about Lunken Airport. Looking through the list of questions we have from you, we decided to stay on course, and landed another airport question.
Timothy O'Connor of College Hill is curious about a grassy field just south of Winton Woods.
"I wanna know, there's a very large, long field at Lakeridge Road and McKelvey Road. Neighbors have shared with me that they thought this long straight path was once a layover way station for transporting planes to the European Theater in World War II."
O'Connor also wants to know if it was connected in any way to what is now the GE Aviation plant in Evendale, which is four miles away, due east.
A look at the land in question confirms it is flat, and except for some grasses, empty.
Paul Freeman likes to find and record old airfields, landing strips and pads. His website, Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields, has about 2,800 of them listed.
"It started out as just sort of an obscure little hobby," he says. "And I've always been an aviation history buff and a map buff as well."
Freeman says his interests all came together when he started taking flying lessons, and was introduced to aviation maps. That's where he noticed the symbol for abandoned airports. They're listed so pilots can use them as landmarks, or in an emergency, as a safer place to touch down than perhaps a street.
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He started researching abandoned landing strips and airports near him in Virginia, and posted what he found online. Freeman says soon, he was getting tips and photos from across the country.
He says marking the former runways strikes a chord with a lot of people.
"It's because, 'This is the airport where I learned to fly,' or 'This is the airport where I did fly for years and years, before it became townhouses.' I get a lot of that," he says. "And then for the former military airfields that I cover, I also get a lot of sentimental aspects because people will say, 'This is where my dad was stationed during the war. This is where he learned to fly.' "
Speaking of the war, the original question was if the strip of land south of Winton Woods at the corner of Lakeridge and McKelvey was used to ferry aircraft across the country.
If you drive by the site today, you will only see an empty field. However, aerial views show something else.
"It kind of looks like a Q-Tip. There's a paved oval section at each end, and then there's a grass strip," he says. "You can still tell that either it was a grass airfield, or maybe it also was paved, just not paved quite as thickly as the turnaround pad."
Freeman says paving the ends only was cheaper than paving the entire runway.
He can't rule out military use. He can't confirm it either.
"I don't have anything about it during World War II at all," he says. "I basically had access to a 1932 aerial photo which didn't show anything there. And then I don't have anything about it until the 1950s."
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Freeman says he doubts it was used for warplanes. The field is pretty small, and there are lots of bigger airports nearby.
"This one really didn't have hardly any infrastructure at all, the kind of characteristic things you would see for a World War II airfield," he says. "This really does look like exactly what it was supposedly, which is a private person's airfield."
Freeman says he gets tips from visitors to his website all the time, which led to our answer.
"This particular property, Wright's Farm Airfield, was built by a gentleman who was president of a paper company. He himself wasn't a pilot. He had a company plane and that airfield was used to fly him back and forth to company business."
Bill Arrico wrote to Freeman saying his father was one of the pilots for Champion Paper, and, more specifically, its president, Reuben Robertson Junior.
Robertson also served as deputy secretary of defense during the Eisenhower administration. His home was near the landing strip. A story in the March 14, 1960, edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer reports his accidental death. It also lists his residence as 9974 McKelvey.
Today the land is owned by Great Parks of Hamilton County. Chief of Conservation and Parks Jason Rahe confirms the airfield story. He says the plans are to keep it a natural undeveloped space for now, to promote native plants and animals.
