Page 90 - Demo

While barnstorming pilots had taken off from, and landed in, various farm fields around Shelbyville, it wasn%u2019t until 1928 that one particular field was authorized for use by commercial air traffic. The site was a meadow about three miles northwest of the town, near the Old Michigan Road. The 900-foot long grass strip was leased by the Civil Aeronautics Board from Melvin Bassett, and was operated as an emergency landing site for early Air Mail pilots.To guide planes along their route, the field had a beacon light atop a tower sitting on a concrete arrow which pointed toward Indianapolis. Such arrows were spaced about 10 miles apart along various air-mail routes in the state. At night, a pilot could simply follow the beacon lights to reach his destination. If the weather was clear, they were visible for several miles. While the Shelbyville tower is long gone, the concrete arrow is still in place%u2014one of only three remaining in Indiana.In 1956, a group of Shelbyville businessmen decided to revive the old airport on Michigan Road. In the beginning, their venture occupied just 33 acres of the original 80-acre parcel. By 1965, the facility was taken over by the City of Shelbyville. Today, it has grown dramatically into a 520-acre site.Another early airport in the county was Nave Field. It was a grass strip owned by Fred Nave, along the old Rushville Road, and was recognized by the Aeronautics Branch of Department of Commerce in 1930. It was a tricky place for planes to land because of electric power lines at one end of the runway. Reminiscing about the field, an older resident recalled that planes occasionally dropped %u201cbombs%u201d of unsaleable flour at targets on the ground there, for the sheer fun of it.After World War II, several other airfields were created around Shelbyville, each owned and used by a different set of individuals. Dutch Eddellman operated one at the Pearle Hungerford farm, south of town on State Highway 9. He later moved his operation to State Highway 44, on the east side of Shelbyville.In 1948, Jimmy Sullivan and Claude Compton combined their last names for their Suco Airport, which was situated southeast of Shelbyville. Two years later, a Civil Air Patrol was organized and headquartered there. Their personnel offered search-and-rescue services in a civil air emergency, as well as basic training for Air Force cadets.The two Shelbyville Airport Dedication covers on the following page are for the second location of Dutch Eddellman %u2019s airport (which opened in 1946), and for Memorial Airport, which grew into Shelbyville%u2019s current facility. It was dedicated in 1956.Jewish Post (Indianapolis), July 25, 1947.