History
The Boeing Renton Factory is built on land reclaimed by the lowering of the level of Lake Washington in 1916. From 1916 until 1936 it belonged to the family of Pioneer Washington Coal Industrialist Charles H. Burnett for whom Burnett Avenue and Burnett Park in Renton are named. Burnett acquired the land intending to utilise it for coal storage and shipment. Amy Louise Burnett Bond, Charles Burnett's daughter, whose mother died young was raised by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Cranston Potter as the foster sister and godmother of Bertha Potter (Mrs William Boeing). The Burnett family operated the land as a hay farm. In 1936 Amy Burnett Bond transferred the property back to the state government. It was still mostly semi swamp economically marginal and would cost millions to improve.
The property was then transferred by the State of Washington to the federal government at the start of World War II. The Navy Department established an aircraft factory there for production of the Boeing PBB Sea Ranger flying boat. This order was cancelled, however, to free the factory for production of the B-29 Superfortress, the factory being transferred to the Army in exchange for use of the North American Aviation Kansas City factory for production of land based B-25 Mitchells for the US Marine Corps as PBJ-1s.
Read more about this topic: Boeing Renton Factory
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)