Flint's airport sits on a banker's donated farm

When you fly out of Flint, you take off from a cornfield a banker’s family gave away. In 1928, the family of Arthur Giles Bishop handed the city of Flint 220 acres of farmland, and an airport went up on the property that same year. Bishop was a Flint banker and an early General Motors director, a man with money and a hunch that airplanes were going to matter. He turned out to be right, and the field his family donated grew into the airport that still wears his name.

For years it was a modest place — a strip handling mail planes and private fliers while Flint was busy being one of the great auto towns in the country. The city ran it for decades, and as airline travel got serious the runways got longer and the terminal got bigger. In 1987 voters passed a millage for improvements, and the city handed the keys to a new Bishop International Airport Authority, a nine-member board run jointly by Flint and Genesee County.

These days the airport, southwest of downtown off I-69, is the everyday gateway for mid-Michigan — the place where Flint, the Tri-Cities, and the small towns in between catch a flight without driving to Detroit. Bishop himself died in 1944 and never saw a jet land there. But every passenger who pulls a bag off the carousel is standing on ground a banker’s family decided, almost a century ago, was worth more as a runway than as a farm.