West Michigan's airport sits in Cascade Township — and is named for a hometown president

The busiest airport in West Michigan is not in Grand Rapids. It’s about thirteen miles southeast, out in Cascade Township, where there was room to build long runways in 1963 that the city itself didn’t have. The whole operation moved out there in one go: at midnight on November 23, 1963, every bit of Kent County’s air service shifted from the cramped old field on 44th Street to the new airport in the country. The new place was dedicated the following June.

It opened plainly as Kent County Airport. In 1977, when a U.S. Customs office moved in and international flights became possible, it grew a longer name — Kent County International Airport. Then in December 1999 it took on the name it carries now, after the man Grand Rapids claims as its own: Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president, who grew up in the city and is buried at the museum that bears his name on the riverbank downtown.

That makes the airport code, GRR, one of the few in the country that still points at a place — Grand Rapids — even though the runways are in another township entirely. Kent County ran the airport directly until 2016, when it handed the keys to a dedicated authority. By 2018 it was moving more than three million travelers a year.

So the gateway to a city is named for a president from that city, sitting in a township most travelers never realize they’ve landed in — taxiing past cornfields a few miles before they ever see the skyline they came for.