SOUTHBOROUGH – Walking through town, one feels quite grounded in Southborough. Unlike Worcester, with its seven hills, many of us don’t get the chance to see a vantage of the surrounding area. Since the destruction of the Cordaville Mill in 1974, the tallest structures in town are the Pilgrim Congregational Church, or perhaps the new science building at St. Mark’s. Trees obscure many other potential views. Yet for as long as we could, Southborough has looked to the skies.
Southborough’s reach to the open air began in the nineteenth century. Photographs taken from the steeple of Pilgrim Church appear as early as the 1850s. The renowned cartographer Oakley Hoopes Bailey depicted Southville and Cordaville in an 1887 bird’s eye map, likely using a hot air balloon to scope out the villages. The airplane soon turned “bird’s eye” views into simply “aerial” ones.
Some of Southborough’s earliest and most renowned pilots flew for the US Army (before the Air Force was established in 1947). Harry Hubbard Metcalf co-founded the Harvard Flying Corps in 1916, was a top flyer at the Harvard Flying School, taught flight training in Memphis, Tennessee, and attained the rank of Second Lieutenant. Metcalf died of pneumonia before he could fulfill his orders to go to Europe.
Samuel Prescott “Pete” Fay (St. Mark’s class of 1903) was another aviator of the Great War. Fay was leading an expedition through the Canadian Rockies in October 1914 when a camper informed him of the war, months after it started. Fay was astonished by the news, initially assuming the conflict was between the United States and Mexico.
Just three weeks later, he saw an incredible sight in the mountains. “The Northern Lights began,” he wrote in his journal, “and the display, which lasted all night, was the most brilliant and the colour effects the most beautiful I have ever seen. At times it seemed as if the whole sky was illuminated as the streamers of light with the brilliancy and appearance of search lights played over the sky, with here and there big masses of light delicately coloured.”
Fay would soon see actual search lights over the skies of France. He volunteered as an ambulance driver before being commissioned as an aerial observer, where he led long distance, deep reconnaissance behind German lines. First Lieutenant Fay earned a citation for exceptional bravery. He completed an observation mission after being attacked by thirty enemy planes that wounded his pilot, and was credited with the destruction of two planes. Fay was a lifelong aviator and exploration enthusiast after the war.
Today, records show nearly twenty registered pilots reside in Southborough. Drones grow increasingly ubiquitous, especially for realtors finding new ways to photograph homes. One noteworthy landmark in town was a private airstrip, Kallander Field, located near Meadow Lane. It was constructed by the late Peter Kallander, a US Army veteran of the Second World War and Delta Airlines pilot. A landing on the field by the current owner, Southborough radio host and entrepreneur John Garabedian, was uploaded to YouTube in 2020.
