Sutherland Avenue McGhee Tyson Airport

The field that carried Charles McGhee Tyson's name outgrew its site, and in 1937 the airport moved to Blount County. American Airlines flew the first airline flight there on July 29, 1937, a Stinson Trimotor; before that its Stinsons had landed at Island Airport on Dickinson Island. A control tower followed in 1941, and the Air Force built facilities on the field in 1951. Delta flew the first scheduled jets, DC-9s, in December 1965, and the Tennessee Air National Guard's 134th Air Refueling Wing is based there.

What the plaque says

Sutherland Avenue McGhee Tyson Airport In 1927, Walter Self opened the Sutherland Avenue Airfield, Knoxville's first airport. The city brought the 59-acre site in 1929 and renamed it McGhee Tyson Airport, the city's first municipal airport. It bears the name of Lt. J.G. Charles McGhee Tyson, killed in action in a flight over the North Sea in World War I. After it became insufficient for larger planes and increased traffic, officials relocated the airport to Blount County in 1937.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 3.3 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 4.5 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 14 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 16 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• Longstreet's Headquarters — 0.9 mi
• Death of Gen. William P. Sanders — 1.3 mi
• Knoxville College — 2.3 mi
• The Assault Upon Fort Sanders — 2.3 mi