History
On December 19, 1939, the HMS Orion, a British light cruiser chased the “Aracua”, a German freighter, into Port Everglades in Florida. The Aracua stayed there until 1941 when it was seized by the military at the start of World War II. During the week of May 4, 1942, German submarines torpedoed seven ships in the area. In response to the nearby attacks, many training bases were set up by the United States military.
In 1943, Henry D. Perry, a dairy farmer, sold 640 acres (2.6 km2) of land to the U.S. Navy for a flight-training field between Hollywood Boulevard and Pembroke Road. It became known as North Perry Field, and functioned as a training facility for the main base naval air station known as NAS Miami. There also was South Perry Field, which was located to the southeast of North Perry (the Florida Turnpike runs right through this area today). South Perry was a grass field (no facilities/structures) that was only intended to be for North Perry overflow.
North Perry remained inactive after the war, until 1950 when it was acquired by Broward County to become a civilian airport. It was then upgraded for small plane use, as a station for advertising blimps, and for United States Coast Guard helicopters practicing search and rescue skills. The facility suffered minor damage during Hurricane Wilma in 2005.
In 2007, North Perry Airport was named the 2008 "General Aviation Airport of the Year" by the Florida Department of Transportation.
Read more about this topic: North Perry Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)