Local to chronicle airport

Recent discussions on the renaming of Airport Road and the development of the Carolina North satellite campus have brought the Horace Williams Airport into the spotlight.

But the airport’s history, says local historian Doug Eyre, is equally noteworthy.

“It’s a topic of general interest,” Eyre said of the airport. “It attracts a lot of attention and dispute.”

Eyre will present a lecture on the history of the airport at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Chapel Hill Public Library as part of the Sunday Lecture Series, sponsored by the Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library.

Eyre and his wife, Olga, have lived in Chapel Hill for the last 47 years.

A 44-year professor of geography at the University, Eyre also writes a monthly column for The Chapel Hill News about the town’s history since the 1920s.

But he said he has always been interested in history.

“He’s one of our noted historians,” said Joe Capowski, a former mayor of Chapel Hill.

Eyre is a 30-year member of the Chapel Hill Historical Society and a charter member of both the Preservation Society in Chapel Hill and the Chapel Hill Museum.

Eyre said his lecture Sunday will focus on facts and anecdotes about the individuals who contributed to the founding of the airport.

Two of the contributors owned a garage on the corner of Rosemary and Henderson streets that repaired airplanes as well as automobiles, Eyre offered as an example.

“In the late ’20s and early ’30s, you could see aircrafts wheeled in without wings,” Eyre said. “That was one of the interesting spectacles.”

The Horace Williams Airport was only the second airport formally opened in North Carolina.

“After World War II, there was a great burst of interest in aviation in general,” Eyre said. “The airport grew out of that interest.”

By the end of the war, it was the largest university-owned airport in the country, he said.

“After World War II, it was by itself in the countryside,” Eyre said. “In the ’60s and ’70s, the town grew up around it.”

But recently, the future of the airport has been the subject of town and University debate.

The Chapel Hill Town Council voted in December to change the name of Airport Road to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard following almost eleven months of discussion.

Many of the arguments against renaming the road cited the history of the airport as a primary reason.

Eyre said that while he was against the name change, he thinks the council reached a satisfactory solution by calling for separate road signs to recognize the thoroughfare as “Historic Airport Road.”

The airport also has stalled the University’s plans for Carolina North, its research-oriented satellite campus.

The General Assembly passed a resolution to keep the airport open until the N.C. Area Health Education Center program, which uses the airport to fly physicians and patients across the state, is relocated.

“The airport is important in terms of its original construction, and it’s a great asset to the people of the state,” Eyre said.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.