“In the spring of 1944 we moved out on Rural Route 3, called the Airline Road. I dated a girl [whose] mother looked in on an elderly cousin, Percy, for many years. When Percy Elam died in 1956, [she] asked us to go see if there was anything of value in the house. It was very run down and stuff (mostly scattered papers) was all over the floor, thick in layers. I picked up some interesting items, stamps, WWII ration books, photos of very old planes…. The girl wanted to leave because of the spiders and wasps. When we returned her mother said I could have the items, [which] belonged to a fella named Baxter Adams. I had no idea who he was.”
John (Dicky) Hardin (1940-2023), “My Connection to Baxter Adams” via. Ancestry.com
In the previous post we met Joseph and Eleanor (Grayson) Adams, bridge-builders and leading citizens in mid to late 19th century Henderson, Kentucky. Joseph and Eleanor had eight children, and a farm off the Airline Road. Only their 7th child had children of his own. In 1881 Robert Grayson Adams (1856-1896) married Mattie Elam (1859-1949), older sister of the aforementioned Percy. Robert and Mattie’s oldest child was Baxter Harrison Adams.
The Early Birds – Celebrated Pioneers
From 1914 through 1917, Baxter Adams was among the most celebrated men in America. His arrival in a new town was promoted for days in advance, his exploits splashed across the front pages of newspapers. Baxter was a pioneer in a dangerous new discipline, a discipline many contemporaries died trying to perfect. The Early Birds of Aviation recognizes pioneering powered-flight aviators like Baxter, and honors the dozens who were killed furthering the fledgling enterprise.
“Adams wasn’t the first aviator to fly in the Tri-county area, but he was certainly the first of the homegrown variety. Horace Kearney put on a flying exhibition at the Union County Fair in Uniontown [KY] in August of 1912. Kearney had broken 14 different bones learning to fly, which he began doing about 1909 -a mere six years after the Wright brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk.”
Henderson (KY) Gleaner (special historical edition), 28 Nov 1999.
Horace Kearney
In 1912, 26-year old farmer Baxter Adams lived in Henderson with his widowed mother Mattie and 24-year old brother Robert. “I happened to go to a county fair and saw Horace Kearney, a flier for the Curtiss Exhibition Co. I watched him take off, circle around the field, do a few mild stunts and land. It looked easy. After the flight I learned that he was being paid $600 for the single exhibition flight. I asked him where I could learn to fly. He told me to go to Glenn Curtiss, who was opening a training school for would-be aviators.”1 Kansas City-native Kearney died that December after ditching his craft in the Pacific Ocean during a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He was 27-years old.
Curtiss Flying School
“I soloed on my first flight! The reason is simple. The planes wouldn’t carry more than one person.”
Baxter Adams
By the summer of 1913, Baxter was in Hammondsport, New York, under the tutelage of Glenn Hammond Curtiss (1878-1930), a champion bicyclist, motorcycle racer, engine designer, and aviation trailblazer who “started our training in flying boats. As soon as they considered we had showed talent enough… they shipped us clear across the country to San Diego to learn to fly land planes. Today [1936], a student’s first big thrill comes when he soloes. But I… soloed on [my] first flight! The reason is simple. The planes wouldn’t carry more than one person…. We trained first on a ship called the Curtiss-Spider. Like a spider, it couldn’t get off the ground without something to hold it up.” Baxter graduated to hedge-hopping Curtiss Jennys, then Curtiss Sixties. “When we finally got in the Sixties we found ourselves flying. There was nothing to do after that except to worry about how to get down,” Baxter joked.1
Lincoln Beachey
Baxter befriended Lincoln Beachey in Hammondsport in September 1913. “After his accident in October I nursed him in my room until he was able to get about and he told me many interesting things. Beachey advised me never to use any machine but a Curtiss Exhibition Biplane for stunt flying, and said at the time, ‘If you are ever asked to fly a machine with which you are not familiar, don’t stop to talk. Beat it.’ This makes his death in a monoplane altogether incomprehensible to me.”2 In March 1915, Lincoln flew a plane of his own design in front of some 250,000 people at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He lost control, crashed into San Francisco Bay, and drowned when he couldn’t unfasten his harness. He was 28-years old. Baxter Adams considered Lincoln to be the world’s greatest stunt pilot, as did Baxter’s acquaintance Orville Wright, who once stated “An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry. His mastery is a thing of beauty to watch. He is the most wonderful flyer of all.”3
Stunt Pilot
“Baxter Does the Tango! Aerial stunt, Pulled off by Henderson Boy, Astonishes the East. It is something different than has yet been attempted even by the daring Beachey.”
The (Earlington, KY) Bee, 15 Sep 1914
On April 9, 1914, Baxter earned his pilot’s license and ordered a 100-horsepower Curtiss “Pusher” Biplane. “It was known as a pusher because the propeller was in the rear and pushed the plane instead of pulling it. The machine was built of bamboo, with struts of red, and the linen wings were painted cream — a sleek shining bird that held its place in the clouds in those early days, The pilot sat strapped and unprotected at the front of the machine. In Mr. Adams’ words he was a ‘witch on a broomstick’ when he took to the air.” 4
In short order, Baxter made a 50-mile distance flight from Hammondsport to Ithaca NY in 27 minutes; volunteered for the Russian Aviator Corps (nothing came of the offer); married 26-year old Hammondsport schoolteacher Rodella Carpenter; took a honeymoon trip to Vermont; soared to 6000 feet, and wowed crowds at a number of fairs in the northeast with loop-the-loops and a novel stunt called the aerial tango.
Henderson Homecoming
The exhibition season over, Henderson eagerly promoted the return of their hometown hero and his bride. Aviation demonstrations were scheduled for November 5, 6, and 7, 1914. Opening Day Thursday was a triumph. “HENDERSON BIRDMAN IN LOOP-THE-LOOP, Baxter Adams Pleases His Home Folk. Over one thousand people attended the first aviation meet ever held in this city. Aviator Baxter Adams remained in the air thirty-five minutes and successfully pulled off several difficult aerial stunts. He looped-the-loop, did an aerial tango, and flew upside down for several moments. Adams will fly Friday and Saturday.”5
Baxter later recalled what happened at takeoff on Friday. “All went well for a few seconds. But it soon became apparent that the ship wasn’t gaining altitude properly. Above 10 feet it wouldn’t budge.”1 The aircraft struck the shed of an adjacent brickyard, and Baxter broke an ankle in the fall. Like most early pilots, Baxter was a capable mechanic, his main challenge being obtaining the repair parts needed. By the spring of 1915, he was ready for new adventures.
“I cleared between $30,000 and $35,000 the first year,” Baxter said. He was only the third person in the world to loop-the-loop, and the first to fly in a circle with the wings sideways in a 90-degree vertical bank. “Up to the time I tried it, it wasn’t believed that a plane could fly in that position.“6
1915 Barnstorming Tour
“The great feature of the fair yesterday was the advent of Baxter Adams, the aviator. He had a hard place to fill, coming after Art Smith, the greatest on earth. But [Adams]… excelled Smith. His dives caused hundreds of people in the paddock to “duck” when he made his hair raising slides. He appeared to be coming directly down upon the throngs beneath. But within a few hundred feet Adams turned his plane upward and shot into the empyrean like a streak of lightning.”
The Richmond Virginian, 15 Oct 1915 pg.1
In late April 1915, newspapers were promoting a flying stunt under the Henderson Bridge. “Baxter Adams will try to loop the loop through the central span of the Louisville and Nashville railroad bridge across the Ohio river. Adams will start through the channel span, which is about seventy feet high, and will make his loop over the bridge and return through the span.”7 A broken propeller in a last-minute practice landing apparently cancelled the attempt. His 1915 barnstorming tour included nearby Hopkinsville, KY; Logansport, IN; Elwood, IN (crashed into barbed wire); Bradford, PA; Oneida, NY (slightly injured in landing); Syracuse, NY (engine failure mid-flight, rough glide-in landing); Rutland, VT (struck in the head in mid-air by a swallow); and Richmond, VA (a final-day mishap damaged the plane, slightly injuring the pilot).
1916 Western Tour
In May 1916, Baxter flew at Sheepshead Bay, NY in an event that featured two female aviators, Katherine Stinson and Ruth Law, with whom he’d reunite for 1917 and 1918 fundraisers. After a well-publicized race in Cleveland in June, performances included stops in North Dakota, South Dakota, Northern Michigan, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado (where Baxter reportedly set altitude records).
Flight Instructor Duty, Fewer Exhibitions – 1917-1919
As America prepared to enter World War I, thousands of men needed to be trained as military pilots. Baxter and other Early Birds were tapped to teach them. In February 1917 he was sent to Memphis, where he helped inaugurate Park Field in nearby Millington, TN, named for Early Bird aviator Lt. Joseph Park, killed in California in 1913.
In late May 1917, Baxter and Rodella traveled through Henderson enroute to a Decoration Day exhibition in Cincinnati, and a new assignment as flight instructor at Ashburn and Chanute Fields in Illinois. The couple once again headed west for summer and fall exhibitions, and once again Baxter was greeted in each state with fawning news coverage.
Wartime appearances in 1918 seemed limited to Red Cross and War Bond fundraisers in Cincinnati and Chicago. Baxter flew a number of times in 1919, after which the Adams flyer was disassembled and crated one final time, the pilot and his bride retiring to the Henderson farm Baxter had left seven years before.
End of An Era
For the January 1920 census, Baxter once more listed his occupation as “farmer.” He and Rodella lived on the Airline Road outside town. Uncle Percy Elam and his 80-year old widowed mother (Baxter’s grandmother) Rebecca were near neighbors, likely living in the very farmhouse where Dickey Hardin would find and preserve Baxter’s papers and photos many years later. In February 1929, a local paper reported on a fire which gutted an abandoned Henderson tobacco warehouse. It was later revealed that the fire consumed a crated relic of aviation history, and that the pioneering 43-year old farmer who once made it loop and tango lived nearby. A new era of pilots were making headlines now – distance and endurance pilots like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.
Henderson’s Pioneering Birdman
Rodella Adams died in 1937, and Baxter followed in 1951. The couple never had children. In 1936, Baxter was interviewed by a local newspaper. The resulting feature was a glowing eulogy, and a fitting tribute to Henderson’s Pioneering Birdman.
A personal aside: I feel a special connection to my relative Baxter Adams. As a U.S. Navy aircraft mechanic, I trained both at NAS North Island near San Diego – the very site where Baxter learned to fly Curtiss-Jennys and -Sixties in the winter of 1913-14; and at NAS Memphis in Millington – the very site where Baxter taught WWI fliers in 1917. To Baxter and his contemporaries, all honor.
HIGH FLIGHT
by John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
1 “Henderson Man’s First Airplane Flight Was Solo,” The Evansville (IN) Press, 19 Jul 1936 pg B1
2 “Baxter Tells of Beachey’s Death,” Unsourced newspaper clipping (inferred Oswego, NY) 20 Mar 1915 via Ancestry.com
3 Death details and Orville Wright quotation from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Beachey accessed May 14, 2025.
4 “Yesterday’s News: Fire Destroyed First Airplane to Fly Locally” by Frank Boyett, Hendersonville (KY) Gleaner, 8 Feb 2004 citing article from 2 Feb 1929. From https://earlyaviators.com/eadamsba.htm accessed May 14, 2025.
5 The Evansville (IN) Courier, 6 Nov 1914 pg. 3
6“Crash Didn’t Stop Aviator’s Barnstorming” by Frank Boyett, Henderson (KY) Gleaner (special historical edition), 28 Nov 1999 via Ancestry.com
7 “Good-By Adams,” Salt Lake (UT) Telegram via wire, 3 May 1915
No Comments