Aviation had a long history in Raleigh County before the Beckley-Mount Hope Airport broke ground in 1933. Col. Paul Peck of Hinton is thought to be the first person to land an airplane in Raleigh County, in a field sometime before 1912, only a few years after Orville Wright’s first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Early landing fields were unpaved, unimproved farm fields with no aviation services nearby. Air traffic in Beckley increased with the popularity of air travel in the 1920s and 30s. Several of General Billy Mitchell’s US Army aircraft landed in the Beckley area in 1921 on their way to the Battle of Blair Mountain. Humorist Will Rogers visited Beckley in 1927 and was inconvenienced by the lack of a modern airfield. Much early air activity in Beckley centered on Tolley Field, a cow pasture along Johnstown Road, where the county’s first aviation fatalities occurred when two men died in a plane crash in 1935. The completion of Beckley-Mount Hope Airport’s modern facilities in 1937 improved air safety for Raleigh County’s travelers of the skies.