Wiley Hardeman Post

Post's start in the air ran through other people's money. He lost his left eye in an oilfield accident near Seminole, Oklahoma, on October 1, 1926, and about $1,700 in workman's compensation helped him buy a plane, the Handbook of Texas says. He became a private pilot for oilmen Powell Briscoe and F. C. Hall; Hall bought a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae after his daughter in 1928 and a second one in 1930. After a falling-out following the 1931 flight, Post bought the airplane himself. His widow sold it to the Smithsonian soon after his death in 1935.

What the plaque says

Wiley Hardeman Post Pioneer aviator Wiley Hardeman Post was born on November 22, 1898, in the community of Corinth in Van Zandt County, to William Francis and Mae Laine Post, who moved to Oklahoma when Wiley was a boy. Wiley was inspired as a youth to learn to fly. In the late 1920s he obtained flight training, made his first solo flight, and acquired an air transport license. Despite the loss of one eye in an oil field accident, Post worked as a barnstormer, commercial pilot and flight instructor. Post set many flight records and won the national air races in 1930. He and Harold Gatty circled the world, flying 15,474 miles in less than 9 days in 1931. Post soloed around the world in less than 8 days in 1933. Post invented and developed the first pressurized flight suit, explored stratospheric flight, and used an early Sperry autopilot mechanism. He worked with the U. S. Army Air Corps on an experimental automatic direction finding (ADF) radio compass, and was a pioneer in the use of liquid oxygen for high altitude flight. Post and humorist Will Rogers died in a plane crash on a trip to Alaska in 1935. His plane the "Winnie Mae" is in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Governor Hogg Shrine — 17 mi
  Quitman's 27-acre city park, once a state historical park, where two houses tied to James Stephen Hogg's marriage stand beside an arboretum, a nature walk and the grounds of the Old Settlers Reunion.
• Purtis Creek State Park — 28 mi
  A 1,582-acre park straddling the Henderson and Van Zandt county line, built around a 355-acre lake with no-wake fishing, borrowed tackle, a 4.1-mile hike-and-bike trail and a nature path.
• Tyler State Park — 28 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.
• Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum — 32 mi
  More than 38,000 rose bushes of about 600 cultivars in a free city garden, beside a museum of the Texas Rose Festival, which began in 1933, and of the rose industry.

More markers nearby

• Grand Saline C.S.A. — 0.6 mi
• Poletown and Rhodesburg — 1.3 mi
• Benjamin Franklin Wheeler — 2.9 mi
• Mercer's Colony Eastern Boundary — 3.0 mi