This site housed the Kreider-Reisner Aircraft Company and later the Fairchild Aircraft Company. Kreider-Reisner, one of America's earlier formal aircraft manufacturers, operated from 1923 until a few years after Sherman Fairchild purchased it in 1929, and as of 2007 fourteen surviving Kreider-Reisner airplanes were still on Federal Aviation Administration rolls. After losing several businesses in the Great Depression, Sherman Fairchild retained Kreider-Reisner and in 1931 consolidated his remaining holdings into the Fairchild Aircraft Company, operating here at what became known as Plant #1. Despite the economy, Fairchild Aircraft prospered by producing popular civilian and military aircraft, and by 1939 it had become the Fairchild Aircraft Division of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. Production expanded dramatically during World War II, when Fairchild won government contracts to build thousands of PT-19 single-engined primary training aircraft, constructed a second plant north of town at the present Hagerstown Regional Airport in 1941, and became Hagerstown's largest wartime employer with 8,117 local employees in 1943. To meet wartime production demands, Fairchild created the Hagerstown System, coordinating more than two dozen local businesses to manufacture components for final assembly at its factories, and this system later served as a model for other wartime manufacturing efforts. After the war, the Hagerstown facilities produced military fighter and cargo aircraft, including the C-82 and C-119 Flying Boxcar, and the last aircraft produced at this site was completed in 1963. The last planes built in Hagerstown were more than 700 A-10 Thunderbolt jets, nicknamed the Warthog, under Department of Defense contract, and the final A-10 left the production line in 1984.