It was 100 years ago this week - way back in 1924, in the thick of the early roaring days of aviation history - when a giant U.S. Navy airship visited the Puget Sound and took the population by storm. This historic event is mostly forgotten now, but a local historian has found the hidden spot where history was made.
"O, the humanity!" was the indelible phrase uttered by broadcaster Herb Morrison in May 1937 when the Hindenburg - the most famous airship of all time - exploded in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
More than a decade before that deadly tragedy heralded the end of the airship era, what's arguably the second-most famous airship - the U.S. Navy's Shenandoah - was launched and then embarked on a national tour.
"The Shenandoah was the experiment that the Navy started back in the 1920s for the lighter-than-air program," historian Lee Corbin told KIRO Newsradio Wednesday, as we was standing at the forgotten historic spot at what's now a meadow at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM). "And the Shenandoah was the first of four dirigibles that the Navy obtained."
"To test it out, they flew it on a cross country trip from Lakehurst, New Jersey, all the way out here to Seattle," Corbin said.
The visit of the 680-foot long, helium-filled airship came three years before Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and just weeks after the around-the-world flight had concluded at Sand Point on Lake Washington. Boeing was already in business, and was on its way to making the Northwest a key player in aviation at a time when the military was driving developments in all kinds of aviation.
A century later, there's very little evidence of the visit of the Shenandoah to the Northwest other than some old photos and one key piece of special infrastructure, not far from the main runway at McChord Field.
"That's where the mooring mast that they built specifically for the Shenandoah was placed back when it was Camp Lewis," Corbin explained to KIRO Newsradio, live from the scene early Wednesday in an otherwise quiet spot at what's now JBLM. "And in fact, I discovered just the other day that this area was known as Bovine Prairie."
The mast, which was only used that one time when the Shenandoah visited in October 1924, was maintained by the Navy until 1936, when it was disassembled. All that's left now is a big chunk of concrete, which was the foundation for the mast, at it's mostly at ground level and hidden in the grass.
"All it did was break lawnmower blades for the last 100 years around here," Corbin observed. "The foundation is what's left over from the mooring mast, and there's a number of other little concrete pads around where the equipment sat and things like that."
The mast, while it stood for those dozen or so years, was not an insignificant piece of infrastructure.
"Depending on what document you look at, it was somewhere between 160 to 172 feet tall," Corbin said. "I think, officially, they called it 170 feet."
And the mast wasn't as simple as a giant flagpole or a big pipe standing on end. Corbin says it had a complex internal structure designed to serve the needs of the Shenandoah and other airships that the Navy anticipated bringing to Camp Lewis.
"There was the mast itself, and then there was a large pipe, basically for the helium," Corbin explained. "And then it also had pipes for water, which was used for ballast on the ship, and then also for the gasoline for the engines."
The foundation of the mast is not marked in any way, and there's no interpretive signage. McChord staff, when initially contacted about the concrete foundation a few years ago, had never heard the story of the Shenandoah's visit.
That didn't deter veteran military pilot Lee Corbin from mounting a search.
"I just started, like I usually do, finding out, finding a story in the newspapers when I was looking at things, and I just started looking at aerial photos and old maps and things like that," Corbin explained. "And I discovered the track they put, they eventually put a circular track around it at about 550 feet out from the from the mast which was going to be used in anticipation of the some of the later dirigibles coming here to the Puget Sound area, including the USS Akron."
That track was built to accommodate a heavy, wheeled vehicle that was designed to have a mooring line from the stern of the airship tied to it. As the wind blew and the airship rotated around the mast like a giant wind vane, the heavy vehicle would stay below, circling around the mast if necessary and keeping it a consistent height above the ground.
"I was able to find that track on an aerial photo from 1941," Corbin said. Portions of the track are also visible on recent LiDAR images that Corbin tracked down.
Like the Hindenburg in 1937, the Shenandoah would also come to a premature and violent end less than a year after its visit to Puget Sound.
Corbin says Captain Zachary Lansdowne, commander of the Shenandoah, warned his Navy superiors that a summertime visit to Lansdowne's native Ohio or any part of the Midwest might not be a good idea - on account of severe thunderstorms.
"So they deferred for a few weeks, and then they finally said, 'No, you're going in September, early September,'" Corbin said. "So he reluctantly took this thing out and over Ohio, ran into a pretty good sized thunderstorm, and the ship actually ended up breaking up."
Corbin says that Army and Air Force officials at JBLM have so far not been receptive to his efforts to draw more attention to the mooring mast foundation or to otherwise commemorate the historic chunk of concrete for those who might happen to stumble across it while on base.
"It's pretty much forgotten" at JBLM, Corbin said. "I've tried hard to get some sort of marking on it, but I think the Air Force and Army are a little reluctant to put something up that helps the Navy."