Marvin Airport: Montclair's Role in Aviation

Anyone who has flown out of, or driven by, Essex County Airport on Passaic Avenue in Fairfield has probably assumed that the airport was conceived by local public officials. After all, before it was named for the county, it was also known as Caldwell Airport. Thanks, however, to the sleuthing of former Montclair resident, Alex Davidson, the early history of the airport, which is 80 years old, is now known. Surprisingly the airport, nearly 7 miles from town, was conceived to be an airport for Montclair residents.

This discovery begins with the recent decision of Joanne Davidson to sell the house at 383 Park Street where she and Alex's uncle Al had resided for decades before his death three years ago. While cleaning out the home to prepare it for sale, Alex came across a treasure trove in the basement and attic.

One part of the trove was a scrapbook with photos from his grandfather, Benjamin Palmer (B. P.) Davidson, the Newark Star-Eagle's "Today in Aviation" editor. He is the same individual who had rescued an eagle statue from destruction when a Newark Post Office building was torn down in 1938, then kept it in the Park Street house's backyard until the eagle was returned by the family to Newark for an unveiling in March 2002 only to be beheaded by a deranged young man in 2003. It has since been restored.

Among B. P. Davidson's photos was a picture of Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis with the engine hoisted above it for overhaul at Teterboro Airport. The photo was taken upon Lucky Lindy's return from his first successful transatlantic flight. Alex soon realized that the photo was so rare that he offered it to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, which eagerly accepted the one-of-a-kind photo.

In researching the photo at the Passaic County Historical Library, housed at Lambert Castle out Valley Road in Paterson, Alex came across a telegram expressing Lindbergh's thanks for how well the Wright engine performed during the famed flight. Alex's father, Ben, had mentioned that Alex's grandfather, B. P., often wrote about the airport in Caldwell, so Alex began looking for articles written by him. Shortly thereafter, Alex discovered that the airport, which later became Caldwell Airport and then Essex County Airport, was originally known as Curtiss Marvin Airport in 1929.

When he asked Fairfield area historians why it was known as Marvin, no one knew or even recollected that name. Most people remembered it as Essex Airport Curtiss-Wright Field, Caldwell, New Jersey which is how the U.S. Department of Commerce, Aeronautics Branch, referred to it in an August 13, 1930 Airway Bulletin. Curtiss-Wright had been a major employer in the area, but the airport history had been all but lost, a concept that bothered Alex who had learned to fly there in the 1960s as a teenager.

Soon Alex was at the Newark Library, where he found a 1970 obituary for Walter Sands Marvin, a stockbroker and banker, who had been president of Curtiss Airports Corporation and a founding director, with Charles Lindbergh, of Transcontinental Air Transport Company (T.A.T.), predecessor to TWA. In an amazing coincidence, the Brooklyn-born Marvin had moved to Montclair in 1919.

This led to the second part of the Park Street treasure trove: hard-bound volumes of The Montclair Times from 1900 to 1940, a period in which The Montclair Times was published twice a week filled with social notes about the comings and goings and social activities of area residents in Montclair and the North End, a term the Times changed in the late 1920s to Upper Montclair.

Alex and his family had donated these volumes to the Montclair Library, when they emptied the house, with the stipulation that the family be allowed to use them for research. Thus, down to the Montclair Library he went, weekend after weekend, with two assistants. One was David Cannon, a town resident since 1958 who grew up nearby at 412 Park Street and had done extensive research at the library in 1976. Later as a copywriter for Block Advertising, he wrote the positioning slogan that the Library used for many years on stationery: "Wisdom from the past, information about today, knowledge for tomorrow."

The other assistant was Phyllis Mariani of Tiffany & Co. who also wanted to scan the old newspapers because she was interested in learning more about the largest freshwater pearl which had been found either in Paterson's Third River or in Montclair's Toney's Brook depending on what one read. Paterson in maps from the 1800s had abutted Montclair. The pearl was eventually crafted by Tiffany & Co. into a crown worn by Princess Eugenia when she married Napoleon III.

Alex's research team meticulously searched each issue for news of the airport opening and finally found the Rosetta stone: An April 20, 1929 article announcing that a group of seven men, most from Montclair, were forming a private company, Essex Airport, Inc., to open an airport to serve Montclair. Seven miles from the town, it was near enough to reach quickly by Bloomfield Avenue without putting Montclair homes on the First Watchung Mountain at risk. A newspaper at the time noted, "The proposed establishment of an aviation field near Caldwell recalls the one that existed in Fairfield section nearby, during the war when a Naval Rifle Range was located in Caldwell Township." The new airport would be known as Marvin Field, named after, Walter Marvin, the Montclair man who had spearheaded the project.