History
It began in 1926 when Harold Frederick Pitcairn constructed a hangar and a grass airstrip in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The name "Willow Grove" came from the nearest town. At the time, Horsham was a rural township with little significance. From 1926 to 1942 Pitcairn used the airfield for design, construction and testing of a number of aircraft, including the Mailwing which was used by the United States Postal Service.
After the start of World War II, the United States purchased the grounds, and launched a classified anti-submarine warfare program at the base. Following World War II and into the Cold War, it became an operational and training bases for aviation activities of the Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, Army Reserve and Army National Guard. As part of its joint recruitment efforts, the base was an annual host to one of the largest air shows on the East Coast until 2006.
Read more about this topic: Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)