Delta Air Lines has roots in Ogdensburg firm

A fully-restored 1925 Huff-Daland Duster, which was manufactured in Louisiana, hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. The plane was a gift to the museum from Delta Airlines. The remains of two of the original 18 dusters that Huff-Daland produced stayed in storage until 1967 when Delta Air Lines selected one of them for restoration. Huff-Daland Dusters were based on a bi-plane that was manufactured in 1920 in Ogdensburg. Photo courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Northern New York has always been the home of big businesses. Today, with the internationally-recognized Car Freshner Corp. calling Watertown home, and drugstore chain Kinney Drugs having built corporate headquarters in Gouverneur, modern day businesses are flourishing in the north country.

However, there’s one international travel juggernaut that has roots in St. Lawrence County that often goes unrecognized. The Delta Air Lines that the world knows today was actually born out of a company that was started in Ogdensburg: Ogdensburg Aeroway Corp.

In 1920, Thomas H. Huff and Elliot Daland, two St. Lawrence County-based engineers, founded the Ogdensburg Aeroway Corp. Lauded pioneers of their time, Mr. Huff and Mr. Daland were both educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mr. Daland attended Harvard University. Newspaper reports about the formation of the company and its industry-leading inventions were oftentimes boastful and breathless.

The Ogdensburg Aeroway Corp. quickly changed its operating name to Huff-Daland Aeroway Corp. and was responsible for inventing and manufacturing military airplanes, bi-planes, seaplanes and powerboats. According to a 1989 Watertown Daily Times article, which quoted the late Clarkson University Professor Emeritus Robert A. Wyant, Mr. Wyant stated that Huff-Daland produced more than 7,500 biplanes in Ogdensburg. Mr. Wyant went on to publish works on the history of Huff-Daland. The basis for starting the company in Ogdensburg was simple: There were a lot of unemployed boat builders, who would make excellent airplane builders, given the planes’ wooden frames.

While the Army was a frequent client of Huff-Daland, it was the company’s development of a crop duster that would bring them the most success, and eventually pave the path to becoming Delta Air Lines.

In 1924, Huff-Daland crop dusters were first manufactured. The idea for a crop duster first stemmed from the necessity for farmers to fight the boll weevil. As cotton crops were swiftly being destroyed by the invasive insects, farmers would have to crop dust manually with the help of their large farm animals. Not only was the work labor-intensive, but it took farmers quite a bit of time to cover hundreds of acres of croplands. The Huff-Daland biplanes were equipped with tanks carrying lead arsenate and calcium arsenate that could cover approximately 750 acres of land in approximately two hours, which was a drastic improvement over the 15-18 acres per day that farmers could cover on land.

The story of Huff-Daland in Ogdensburg comes to a close when the company bought property in Bristol, Pa., and moved the majority of operations to Pennsylvania. The expertise of local wood boat builders was replaced by the need for metal workers, which the population of Pennsylvania provided. The Huff-Daland manufacturing plant was located on Riverside Avenue in Ogdensburg from 1920 to 1925. The plant was replaced by the George Hall complex after the company vacated it and moved to Bristol.

Though not based on St. Lawrence County any longer, Huff-Daland as a company continued to thrive. The Bristol-based company formed a separate crop dusting company, Huff-Daland Dusters, based in Macon, Ga., but eventually was moved to Louisiana. Collett Everman “C.E.” Woolman assumed the post as general manager and vice president of the division.

It was Mr. Woolman who steered Huff-Daland Dusters on its path to becoming Delta Air Lines. Not one for failure, a sharp decrease in company income in 1925 forced Mr. Woolman to look elsewhere for a profitable market for the company. Mr. Woolman began expanding the company’s reach in Mexico, in 1925, and Peru, in 1927. There, he and operations manager Harold R. Harris secured Peruvian air traffic rights to get the company involved in passenger service by air, according to the Delta History Museum. In 1928, Huff-Daland Dusters pilot Dan Tobin inaugurated the passenger airline service on Sept. 13. Come 1929, according to the Delta Museum, Mr. Woolman sold the South American interests and his dream of expansion for the company led to the purchase of three five-passenger, 90 mile-per-hour Travel Air monoplanes. The company name was then changed to Delta Air Service, named by Ogdensburg native Catherine R. Fitzgerald an executive secretary to Mr. Woolman after the Mississippi Delta region that the company served.

On June 17, 1929, Delta flew its inaugural passenger flight from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson, Miss., with but two stops in Shreveport and Monroe, La.

Business history is a monthly feature from the archives of the Watertown Daily Times. Visit www.watertowndailytimes.com to access digital archives since 1988, or stop by the Times, 260 Washington St., Watertown to research materials in our library that date back to the 1800s. Two works previously published in the Watertown Daily Times were used in this piece. The first, written by staff writer Brian Kidwell, was published July 28, 1991; the second was published Oct. 29, 1989, and written by staff writer Kenneth Johnson.