Here are some photos from Roger Labaw of a fly-in at the Twin Pine Airport in the early 1960s. Twin Pine was located on a 51-acre site at the northwest side of the intersection of Lawrenceville-Pennington Road and Federal City Road.
The property is now the Twin Pines Recreation Area, home to numerous soccer fields (see Google Maps).
(Yes, the airport was singular “Twin Pine” and the current fields are plural “Twin Pines.”
UPDATE: The airport’s owners, the Weasners, ran the Twin Pine Sales and Service appliance store and hobby shop in Pennington, originally at the family home at 127 South Main in Pennington, and later from the 1950s to the 1980s at 14 North Main (next to the original location of the Pennington Quality Market). The name comes from two pine trees behind the original store.)
The photos show numerous airplanes exhibited at the event, including small experimental planes.
The open hangar building also is visible in one of the photos.
In the background, to the east, are the timber poles of the “Pole Farm,” remaining from when AT&T used the site for international communications over huge shortwave radio antennas. (Now the Pole Farm at Mercer Meadows – see Mercer Parks and PrincetonInfo article.)
== See all the Twin Pine Airport images in the Image Galley ==
Twin Pine Airport
Originally called Pennington Airport, the airport operated from c1945 to 2008. Charles Lindbergh reportedly frequented the airport during the time he lived at Highfields in Hopewell(?)
William and Jean Weasner purchased the airport in 1956. At the time, there were about 35,000 small planes landing on his airstrip a year, but by the 2000s the number was down to about 4,000.
As shown in the USGS aerial from 1991 (looking east), the airport buildings and hangar were along Lawrenceville-Pennington Road, with one grass runway, approximately 2200 by 100 feet, running northwest / southeast.
Twin Pine was a privately-owned public-use airport. However, by 2008 the Weasners were forced to sell due to rising taxes. The property was purchased for recreational use though a deal between Hopewell Township, Lawrence Township, Hopewell Borough and Pennington Borough, using some $1.5M in grants from Mercer County.
Video of Landing at Twin Pine Airport
YouTube video of a Cessna 150 landing at Twin Pine Airport and taxiing to the hanger area, posted in 2007. (The pilot calls the landing “a little hard” – which really is expected on a grass field.)
== See all the videos on the History Project YouTube Channel ==
More Information
Timelines, photos, maps, aerials
- Wikipedia: Twin Pine Airport
If you know of other photos, documents, and information on the Twin Pine Airport and Hopewell history, please contact us so we can help preserve and share them.
