The story below is from our July/August 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Why were bomber planes based along Williamson Road in 1921? Over 1,000 Roanokers went to find out!
Courtesy of the Virginia Room
Aerial image shows the Williamson Road area that was used for a landing field.
At 10:54am on September 1, 1921, a telegram was delivered to Roanoke Mayor W.W. Boxley. It was from U.S. Army Brigadier General William Mitchell at Langley Field advising the mayor that later that day up to twenty air service bombers would land in Roanoke. The planes would require a landing field, fuel and oil, and the pilots and mechanics would need lodging.
Mayor Boxley was already aware of the reason for the planes. All summer coal miners and coal operators’ hired gunmen had been shooting at one another in Logan and Mingo Counties, West Virginia. What would become known as the “Coal Mine Wars” started in 1920 when United Mine Workers went on strike and then sought to unionize mine workers in southern West Virginia. Coal operators had called in detectives from the Baldwin-Felts Agency in nearby Bluefield to suppress strikers and harass union organizers.
By the fall of 1920, strikebreakers were being imported by mine owners. On one day, a riot erupted at the train station in Williamson between striking miners and strikebreakers getting off the train. The presence of federal troops, often acting as escorts for the imported laborers, allowed several mines to reopen. Eventually, calm was temporarily restored and federal troops withdrawn, leaving law enforcement in the unstable hands of local sheriffs.
The peace did not last long. In the spring of 1921 striking miners clashed with local and state police up and down the banks of the Tug River in an incident known as “The Three Days Battle.” Four men were killed. With a thinly-stretched state national guard, West Virginia’s governor was again compelled to seek a federal troop presence. President Harding deployed Federal troops to Logan and Mingo Counties. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell of the First Provisional Air Brigade, gruff and outspoken, announced to the press upon his arrival in the “strike zone” that the Army Air Service could, by itself, end the strike by dropping canisters of tear gas on the miners. If that failed, ammunition could do it.
Such was the context for the telegram received by Mayor Boxley.
On the day of the telegram some 15,000 miners had surrounded Blair Mountain in Logan County. The stage was set, and newspapers across the country kept readers engrossed in front-page stories about the developing confrontation.
In Roanoke, Boxley and the city’s business and civic leaders were more than willing to assist. With the shutdown of coal mines, the Norfolk & Western Railway had seen profits drop and had expended significant resources guarding their tracks in the strike zone. Furthermore, William Baldwin of Baldwin-Felts was a prominent Roanoke citizen with a Baldwin-Felts office in downtown.
Boxley not only garnered the 2,070 gallons of gasoline and 300 gallons of motor oil requested, he formed a reception committee. The group consisted of himself, Vice-mayor Robert Angell, City Manager W.P. Hunter, and businessman Edward L. Stone. The first to land was Lt. Rex Stoner at 1:15pm. He had left early from Langley Field to scout for a level plot to stage an airfield that could accommodate up to twenty planes and equipment. Stoner had landed on farmland belonging to Berkley E. Price that was about four miles north of the city adjacent to Williamson Road.
The Roanoke Times reported, “The plane circled over the northwest section of the city, crossing the Huff farm...landing in a field about 100 feet from Williamson Road.” As promised, Boxley and his committee motored along Williamson Road, followed by three trucks loaded with drums of gasoline and oil, to greet the pilot and his mechanic. “We are at your service,” said the mayor as he stepped from his vehicle.
Spectators began congregating around Stoner’s craft and listening intently to his explanations as it related to the troubling events unfolding in West Virginia. At 4pm eight black specks were seen coming over the tops of the mountains, and Stoner asked that the crowd clear the field immediately. He then instructed his mechanic to stretch a large white sheet, about 20-feet square, on the ground to alert the approaching pilots to their landing target.
All eight landed safely in what would be called Price’s Field. Six other aircraft arrived later in the evening during a rainstorm that caused a few of the craft to land at the nearby Gish farm. By nightfall, a total of eighteen DeHavilland DH-4B bombers, each equipped with front- and rear-mounted machine guns and carrying tear gas and fragmentation bombs, had arrived.
Stone invited the fifteen pilots and thirteen cadet mechanics to dine with him as his guests at the Shenandoah Club, while Boxley secured their lodging at the Hotel Roanoke and in private residences. Dr. Hugh Trout had committed the local American Legion post to guard the airplanes overnight.
News spread quickly of the landing of eighteen bomber planes just a few miles beyond the city. The Times estimated that six hundred automobiles crammed with passengers had parked in Price’s pasture so persons could see the planes and pilots, and that “the Hotel Roanoke lobby looked much as it did during war-time.”
At dawn on September 2nd, individual planes lifted from Price Field in thirty minute intervals. Spectators were on hand to witness the take-offs that were mostly uneventful, except one. The third plane’s left wing struck a corn shock, causing it to strike a telephone pole, and driving the nose into the ground. The plane came to rest upside down.
Neither the pilot, Valentine Miner, nor his cadet, Virgil Lovell, was seriously injured. A few Roanokers got souvenirs from the wreck. One local man managed to secure the compass, and Judge Clifton Woodrum, who had driven to the field that day with his children in his new Hudson, got pieces of fabric from the wings.
With Price Field now established, the Army officially designated the 20-acre site (in the general vicinity of present-day Breckenridge School) as the link between Langley and Charleston. Lt. H.W. Sheridan was put in charge of the airfield. Within days, the Army had erected wireless and radio stations, tents, and an air signal system. A smoke signal was used by approaching pilots to gage wind direction and conditions. Price Field was a functioning Army airfield. Pilots and aircraft of the 88th Battalion air service bomber squadron were using the alfalfa pasture daily. The radio station transmitted to Charleston, Langley, Baltimore and New York. Pilots returning from the strike zone stated that their main mission was reconnaissance and to occasionally drop bombs on mountain roads to limit miners’ mobility.
The citizens of Mingo and Logan Counties were awed by the presence of so many aircraft such that quiet was easily restored. Price Field was having an impact. By September 14, federal officials began withdrawing troops from the strike zone, and Price Field was dismantled.
The following spring, the airfield was only a memory as Price had re-planted it in corn.
The airmen that passed through Roanoke’s Price Field gained the unique distinction of being the first military air unit to participate in a domestic civil disturbance in American history.
The air strip was not the first airfield in Roanoke, but it was the first truly working “airport” in Roanoke’s history. One young aviator that flew in and out of Price Field and lodged at the Hotel Roanoke was a 24-year-old lieutenant, James Doolittle, who gained national fame during World War II by leading the daring bombing raid over Tokyo, Japan, in 1942 that become known as the “Doolittle Raid.”
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