“How old is that hangar? It looks like something out of the 1920s.”

One of my learners made this remark after landing at Jefferson County International Airport (0S9) in Washington. The hangar is a weather-beaten metal structure with lines of square windows at the roofline. You half expect to see the doors being pushed open by men wearing coveralls and newsboy caps so that an open cockpit biplane occupied by a pilot wearing a leather helmet can be pushed onto the ramp.

That’s probably happened, says Lee Corbin, a Seattle-area retired military and commercial pilot and local historian. According to Corbin, the metal hangar at Jefferson County dates back to World War I. It was a pre-fabricated steel and sheet metal hangar known as a United States All-Steel Hangar, built by the Carnegie Illinois Steel Company.

“This particular hangar was originally built at Rockwell Field down at San Diego. With the opening of Seattle’s first airfield at Sand Point on Lake Washington, the Army decided they would send a small detachment of aircraft to have a presence in the Pacific Northwest,” says Corbin. “The hangar was disassembled then shipped north to Sand Point in 1922.”

Sand Point evolved into Sand Point Naval Air Station. The base was used for training and support through World War II, the Korean conflict, the Cuban Missile crisis, and Vietnam. The proximity of the base to the populated bedroom communities for Seattle resulted in the…