STEWART AIRPORT – Mary Stewart Hafer turns 100 in September. She lives in Massachusetts, but she still fondly remembers growing up in Newburgh.
It was her father, Archie Stewart who convinced her great-uncle Samuel Lachlan Stewart, to donate their farmland to the City of Newburgh to become what is now New York Stewart International Airport.
“He was very, very civic minded so he gave the actual land,” she said. “I am the last living person that actually picnicked on that land when it still belonged to the family,” she told Mid-Hudson News.
At 99, Mrs. Hafer still keeps up on what is happening at the airport that carries her family’s name.
The Stewart men felt that every city should have an airport, thus deeding the property to the City of Newburgh. It would, however, be transferred to West Point as a training facility for pilots during World War II.
Years later it was an Air Force base, then transferred to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority before being taken over by the State Department of Transportation.
In the mid-1990, it was privatized and sold to National Express, a British us company, and later turned over to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to operate. The State DOT still owns the land on which the airport sits.
