Around 1858, Chauncey and Caroline Woolsey moved with their children from Buffalo, New York, to Northport, and Chauncey’s father, Adolphus Woolsey, a War of 1812 veteran, arrived with his wife Harriet soon after. Chauncey purchased more than 150 acres of land for a farm, including this site, but after he enlisted in the 26th Michigan Infantry during the Civil War and died in battle in 1864, his teenage son Byron took over clearing the family land. By the 1890s, Byron operated a successful dairy farm, with Jersey cows supplying milk and cream to summer residents at Northport Point for more than two decades, and he also worked as a builder who constructed his own dairy barn, a chapel, and several local cottages. Byron and his wife Sarah had eight children, and their youngest, Clinton, was born in 1894, trained as an engineer and army pilot, and served in World War I. In 1926, Captain Clinton F. Woolsey became an engineer for the U.S. Army Air Service and was one of ten pilots chosen for the Pan-American Good Will Flight to Central and South America from December 1926 to May 1927, but he died when his plane crashed in February 1927. After his funeral and burial in Northport, Byron Woolsey donated eighty acres of his dairy farm for a memorial airport, including a fieldstone structure believed to have been his creamery, and Leelanau Township added 120 more acres. Civil Works Administration workers were assigned to the airport project in the winter of 1933-34, the farmland was turned into the runway, the creamery became the terminal, and the Clinton F. Woolsey Memorial Airport was dedicated on July 14, 1935.