ARMY AIRPLANE STOPS 

IN HENDERSON FOR GAS

_______________

Thousands Saw Aviators, 

Flying From Washington to Fayetteville.

     Hundreds of Henderson (Vance County) people Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning got their first close up view of the big army airplane. Speaking of the incident the Henderson Daily Dispatch says:

     "The airmen circled over the city for ten or fifteen minutes Tuesday afternoon before they could find a place to alight. They viewed from aloft the race track at the fair grounds and also open lots to the south of the city, but none of these were suitable. The open field just to the left of the Middleburg road, beyond North Henderson, offered them their one best chance, and, as Lieutenant Murray said at  the hotel Tuesday night, it seemed so difficult to find a landing that he was 'beginning to pray for some soft trees to drop into.' It  would have been impossible for them to have remained in the air for more than a very few minutes longer, the flyers said, for gasoline was getting extremely low.

We don't know what plane landed in Henderson, but this is a Dayton-Wright DH-4 which was in use at that time.
Dayton-Wright Airplane Company
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/dayton-wright-airplane-company/

     "They said Henderson was on a direct air line between Washington and Fayetteville (Cumberland County), and that if it would prepare a landing field and let the army aviators know it, many of them would put in here for gasoline and spend the night when passing. It was their view, too, that there would be much flying from this time on through this section, the planes traveling between Washington and other points north to the artillery training station at Camp Bragg, at Fayetteville, which is to be a permanent camp for the future."

[Henderson Oxford Public Ledger ]