The Far South Suburb Henry Ford Picked for America’s First Scheduled Air Cargo Route

Lansing sits at the far southern edge of Cook County, right against the Indiana border — which is part of why the drive up to O’Hare runs longer than it does from most Chicago suburbs. But Lansing has its own direct connection to aviation history. The land was first settled in 1843 by August Hildebrandt and his family, and the town took its name from Henry, George, and John Lansing, three brothers who arrived in 1846; Henry opened the first general store in 1864, became postmaster in 1865 (which is how the Lansing name stuck), and John platted the town the same year. The village incorporated in 1893 with roughly 200 residents.

In 1923, Henry Ford bought roughly 1,400 acres here to link Chicago’s south side to his factories near Detroit. On April 13, 1925, the first flight of “Ford Air Transport” took off between Dearborn, Michigan and Lansing, Illinois — widely credited as the first regularly scheduled commercial air freight service in the United States. Ford then built the Ford Hangar here in 1926–27, designed by Albert Kahn, the same architect behind Ford’s landmark Highland Park plant. Its cantilevered steel construction and single-operator sliding doors were ahead of their time, and it’s believed to be the oldest airport building still standing in the Chicago area. The Village of Lansing bought the airport outright in 1976, and the Ford Hangar earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 — it’s even featured on Lansing’s own village seal.

Lansing’s clay-rich soil also fed a serious brickmaking industry: four brickyards operated here between the 1880s and 1920s, at peak shipping tens of thousands of bricks a day by rail. The village marked that history with a History Plaza in 2017, honoring the industry that helped build much of the south suburbs brick by brick.