100 Years Ago: Air Mail Flies into Homer

By Wesley Harris
Claiborne Parish Library Historian

“We doubt if there is a town the size and importance of Homer that has such sorry mail facilities,” the Homer Guardian-Journal noted in 1919.

The newspaper was not criticizing the U. S. Post Office as much as complaining about train schedules injecting unnecessary delays in the delivery of the mail. With an enormous amount of mail produced by the oil boom in Homer, the delays interfered with timely business transactions. Leases, contracts, and other legal documents were exchanged between Homer and Shreveport and points beyond as investors and property owners conducted business.

The east-west Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific train departed Shreveport with Homer’s mail before the morning mail from Dallas and New Orleans arrived. Therefore, mail from the west or south was delayed by a day. Mail from Shreveport and from the east came into Gibsland on the V. S. & P. Railroad, and was then transferred to the Louisiana & Northwest for the journey north to Homer. But the L. & N.W. left for Homer before the trains from the east and west arrived, also delaying the mail by another 24 hours.

The Guardian-Journal proposed a solution: “We suggest to the business men that a petition to the postal authorities might be effective in arranging to have the mail brought [from Gibsland] once a day from the V. S. & P. by motor truck.”

Whether a petition was prepared is unclear, but the Post Office recognized the need to hasten delivery of mail related to the oil transactions. Announcement was made July 19, 1920, that a temporary air mail service between Homer and Shreveport had been authorized.

The route was identified as the first air mail objective because of the enormous amount of correspondence circulating due to the Claiborne Parish oil boom. Other routes between Shreveport and New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandra, and Dallas were contemplated by Post Office authorities.

The first ever air mail flight in the South left the Shreveport fairgrounds at 2:45 p.m. on July 21, piloted by Lieutenant Lin G. Pittman with A. E. Ford, superintendent of mails for the Shreveport Post Office, as a passenger. The Curtiss Jenny biplane, carrying 3,000 pieces of mail, belonged to the Gulf States Aircraft Company which hoped to gain air mail contracts in the region.

The plane landed successfully at the Homer fairgrounds, except for very minor damage to one of the craft’s wings “caused by running into a bunch of horses grazing in the fairgrounds.” A workman from the L. & N.W. repair shop quickly patched up the plane in time for its return to Shreveport.

A newspaper report said, “Homer was very much excited over the flight. Homer postmaster Ezzie Fulmer, Chamber of Commerce and city officers and a great crowd of citizens being at the landing field to watch the arrival and departure of the plane.”

Round-trip flying time totaled about 90 minutes, compared to mail placed on a train at Shreveport taking a day and a half to reach Homer. The return flight to Shreveport carried 1,000 pieces of mail.

How long the service lasted or if it even continued past that first run is unknown. Air mail to and from Homer is not mentioned in the newspapers after July 1920. In 1922, the Guardian-Journal again complained of mail delays on account of the V. S. & P. trains running late. Within five years, numerous air mail routes had been set up across America.

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