The Mount Union Airport

Two men are credited with starting the Mount Union Airport, and no source we have opened names them together. When Brinton H. Hamman of Mount Union died on November 30, 1948, the Huntingdon Daily News called him “the co-founder of the original Mount Union Airport.” The paper said he had been a bricklayer at the Harbison-Walker plant, had run a service station in town for sixteen years and had belonged to the Mount Union Fire Department for twenty-two years. At his death he was secretary treasurer of the Mount Union Aviation Corporation.

The obituary does not name the other founder. A different paper credits Charles W. Huston Jr. as a founder. He had moved to the Dallas, Pennsylvania, area in 1969 to become business manager at Penn State's Wilkes-Barre campus, and The Dallas Post said on November 4, 1971, “He holds a private pilot's license and was a founder of Mt. Union Airport.” Its longer profile of February 15, 1973 does not name the field, but says, “As a sideline, prior to and right after World War II, he became interested in, and built and operated an airport.”

His 1994 obituary does not mention the airport. It says he was born at Three Springs in 1914, owned and operated Huston Ford in Mount Union for many years and died on June 24, 1994.

A 1945 student paper used the name for a joke. On April 3, 1945, The Juniatian, the Juniata College student paper, ran a spoof in which a college senior took off in her Piper Cub “from the Mt. Union Airport” and ended up bombing Tokyo.

The company and the airport turn up in later listings. Air Transportation magazine listed Mt. Union Aviation Corp. of Mount Union, Pa., in its April 1948 directory of air freight and irregular carriers. A Civil Aeronautics Administration list of approved flying and ground schools, dated October 15, 1954, rates “Mount Union Aviation Corp., Mount Union Airport, Mount Union” as a primary flying school and a flight instructor school for airplanes. House Armed Services Committee hearings printed that list the next year. A 1969 report on water resources in Appalachia puts the airport along U.S. 522.

Lester J. Gashaw's 1982 obituary says he instructed air students at the Pennsylvania State College during World War II. After working as a coal miner, he “later operated the Mount Union Airport,” the obituary says, but it gives no dates.

The airport also gave blind children a way to feel what flying was. An account of camps for blind people, written about 1960, says the camps for blind children at Beacon Lodge began in 1959. Their outings included the airport, which “afforded an opportunity to feel a plane and later to stand in its backwash to get some of the feeling of the magnitude of flying.”

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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