Finance History | The Red Barn — A Shipyard Building That Learned to Build Seaplanes

People treat Boeing as a Chicago or Arlington headquarters that later sat in the Dow.

The first factory was a 1909 shipwright's barn on the Duwamish.

William E. Boeing and George Conrad Westervelt incorporated Pacific Aero Products Company on 15 July 1916.

The firm took the name Boeing Airplane Company in 1917 after the Navy accepted the Model C trainer.

The Red Barn, built in 1909 for Heath shipyard work, became the engineering office and the assembly floor.

Carpenters, cabinetmakers, seamstresses, and shipwrights built the first machines there because that was the labor the building already held.

All early production, starting with the Model C, ran through this structure.

The company sold the plant site to the Port of Seattle in 1970.

On 16 December 1975 the 325-ton barn was barged about two miles up the Duwamish and rolled onto the ground that is now the Museum of Flight at 9404 East Marginal Way South.

The restored building opened to the public in 1983.

The pin is the barn itself, not the vanished slip.

What moved is the original factory floor, not a replica.

The mechanism is conversion.

A yard built for wooden hulls already had the trades needed to skin a seaplane.

The listing on an industrial index came much later.

The barn is listed on the National Register as Boeing Airplane Company Building No. 105.

Photo: Benjamin Cody, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.