Amelia Earhart landed in Sunbury twice

Dec. 27—Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of Did You Know stories looking at interesting things, facts and people from the Valley's history that may surprise some residents.

SUNBURY — Amelia Earhart on a routine flight in September 1929 from Long Island to Kansas City encountered bad weather, forcing her to seek a safe place on the ground to wait out the storm.

Earhart, who disappeared in 1937 in an attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, landed her Lockheed-Vega plane at the Sunbury Airport on Packer Island and stayed at the City Hotel — the location of the current Hotel Edison located at Fourth and Market streets — before departing the next day during calmer skies, according to newspaper records. The Valley's brief encounter with the famous aviatrix is a reported event lost to the pages of history no known by many in the local population.

It wasn't the first time she stopped at Sunbury Airport. She also visited in July 1929 for an air show and may have stayed at the home of a Valley resident.

"She was pretty well known at that point, but not for the reason people remember her now," said Northumberland County Historical Society President Dave Ruths. "She was still three years away from her historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932, which was five years after Charles Lindbergh's flight.

"She was well known (in 1929) as the first female passenger in an airplane to go across the Atlantic Ocean. It made her a bit of a hero. When she landed here, people knew who she was."

James Gilfret, the owner of the Sunbury Airport and Campground, said he is proud of Earhart's connection to the Sunbury Airport.

"It's pretty neat and admirable to have someone both historically famous and related to aviation here," he said. "In its heyday, the airport was a much bigger deal. This gives a whole bunch of notoriety. Oftentimes when I tell people, they'll have no interest in the airport until they hear Amelia Earhart was there. It gives it a much higher stature."

The airport has been in Gilfret's family since the 1940s when his grandfather purchased it.

"I like talking about the event because it's significant history for the airport," Gilfret said. "It's a nice thing for us."

Ruths said Sunbury was a big business airport in the early 1900s. Sunbury had a "completely different life to it" and the public was curious about air flight in the early years, he said.

The first visit

Penn Valley Pictures, of Sunbury, produced a two-part documentary about Sunbury in 1999. Volume Two features a 51-second black-and-white and grainy video segment about Earhart landing at the airport on July 29, 1929.

The documentaries were produced by Sunbury resident Jeff Pontius and the late Clarence Weaver, a former Shikellamy teacher from 1947 to 1992. Most of the documentary consists of footage shot by Weaver, but the Earhart footage was shot by Pontius's great-grandfather A.W. Pontius, the founder of the former Pontius Motor Company in Sunbury and former co-owner of Packer Island.

"On July 29, 1929, Amelia Earhart and her mother landed at the Sunbury airfield," the narrator of the documentary said. "A number of local dignities were on hand to greet the lady aviator who became famous three years later as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Here we see Amelia and her mother."

The brief clip shows Earhart, her mother and a group of well-dressed men standing in front of Earhart's plane on the airport property.

"It's a really unique history that not many people know," he said.

Pontius said the Earhart footage was passed down through the family after his great-grandfather died. Pontius sent the footage out to a company to have it cleaned up for the documentary.

Pontius said his great-grandfather died in the late 1930s, so he never heard many stories about how the footage came to be. He believes that Earhart came to Sunbury for an airshow before she was more widely known, and it's also possible that Earhart stayed at A.W. Pontius's home on Packer Island while she was in the Valley. There are no photographs or records proving that particular story is true.

"I was told she stayed there," said Jeff Pontius. "I could never confirm it. I can't swear to God on a hundred stacks of Bibles and say she did."

Pontius still owns that house at 110 Bridge Ave., Sunbury. He is currently doing renovations.

The documentary is available at Moyer's Electronics at 310 N. Second St., Sunbury.

Gilfret provided photographs from July 29, 1929, that show Earhart, facing away from the camera, and two other unidentified people standing in front of the airplane. A second photograph shows the plane on the airport property.

These pictures were given to Gilfret by "an elder gentleman that showed up at the airport one day." It's an occurrence that happens frequently, he said.

The second visit

The Shamokin News-Dispatch on Sept. 17, 1929, published a brief three-paragraph article entitled "Noted Aviatrix lands at Sunbury: Amelia Earhart forced to come down at county seat airport due to storm."

The 32-year-old Earhart at 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 16 "made a forced landing on the Sunbury Aero Club's flying field at Island Park when she was forced out of the skies because of a heavy rain and wind storm and narrowly escaped injury when her plane just missed a fence at the end of the field." The Danville Morning News on Sept. 17 described it as a "graceful landing" at the Island Park field.

"The sky was overcast at the time of her landing with rain imminent," according to The Danville Morning News. "She had been bucking storms during most of the trip from Long Island, she said, and the Sunbury airport was the most promising refuge in sight."

Earhart, who was accompanied by her mother, was flying from Mitchel Field — now known as Mitchell Airforce Base — in Long Island, N.Y., to Kansas City, Mo., when the storm developed, "compelling her to seek safety on the ground," according to the Shamokin News-Dispatch.

The Miltonian on Sept. 19, 1929, had slightly different details, noting that she was flying from New York to Cleveland, not Kansas City, with her mother.

The Danville Morning News said Earhart "soon made herself at home at the landing field, following her arrival (and) readily consented to be interviewed."

"Her mother, who makes frequent air trips with the famous flyer, was also perfectly at home at the flying field," according to The Danville Morning News. "She said she felt no occasion for uneasiness during the stormy trip from Long Island."

Earhart apparently presented Flying Club member Fred Hoffa with a fifth of whiskey, according to the late Joe Diblin, a pilot, veteran, writer, teacher and historian from Northumberland. Diblin wrote a column for The Daily Item in 2020 about famous names that visited the Sunbury Airport in the 1920s and 1930s.

"In an interview with newspapermen while resting at Mayor Walter Drumheller's City Hotel at Sunbury yesterday, Miss Earhart commended the Sunbury Aero Club upon its fine field and promised to visit the city at a later date to give a flying exhibition," according to the Shamokin News-Dispatch.

Drumheller provided Earhart with "royal treatment," according to newspaper records in The Daily Item.

"They remained in Sunbury overnight, departing for the west the next morning," according to the Miltonian.

The Mount Carmel Item on Oct. 1, 1929, wrote a brief story about well-known pilot Dale "Red" Jackson landing at the Sunbury airport and mentioned Earhart.

"Fog and storm thus added another famous name to the galaxy of stars in the log book at the Sunbury airport," it wrote. "Amelia Earhart recently visited the airport and signed the roster."

The Sunbury Flying Club in 1931 invited Earhart back to the airport for an air meet, according to the Elizabeth Echo. If she accepted, there are no records of it.

Meghan Beck, co-owner of the Hotel Edison, said no hotel records exist from the 1920s, so Earhart's alleged stay at the City Hotel is lost to history. The original City Hotel, built in 1871, was gutted by a fire in 1914, and was rebuilt and later renamed in 1922 in honor of Edison.

In an article in The Daily Item on July 28, 1966, Harry Neidig recalled Earhart's visit to the Sunbury Airport. Neidig, described as an early aviation enthusiast and manager of the Milton Airport at the time, said he was not at the field when Earhart landed, but received the details from the late Fred Hoffa, the field manager at the time.

Accompanied by her mother, Earhart was flying a Lockheed Vega, an all-plywood plane. "Miss Earhart signed the register at the airport, but this and other records of the period have vanished," according to The Daily Item.

Which plane?

The plane that landed in Sunbury was not the Lockheed Vega that Earhart would use to fly nonstop and solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932, becoming the first woman to do so. The bright red Lockheed 5B Vega that she used in the transatlantic flight was sold by Earhart in 1933 to Philadelphia's Franklin Institute where it remained until 1966 when the Smithsonian acquired it.

Dorothy Cochrane, the curator for the Vega at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., said she doesn't have a reference to Earhart going to Sunbury but she traveled so much that not all her visits or lectures are recorded in various biographies.

"In early 1929 she still owned an Avro Avian light aircraft," said Cochrane. "She sold it and flew a Lockheed Vega demonstrator for a while. She then acquired Vega NC31E and flew it in the 1929 Women's Air Derby in August 1929. She also flew another Vega, N538M, for a women's speed record in 1929. So she could have visited Sunbury in any of these."

Based on the photograph from Gilfret, Cochrane said the plane appeared to be the Vega NC31E.

Earhart and her navigator Frederick Noonan would go missing on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to fly around the world. They would never be recovered.