Matt Sanda
History of the Property
Before the first blimp cast its shadow over South Weymouth, the land that would become Naval Air Station South Weymouth was home to the Massachusett people, whose territory extended across the coastal plain south of Massachusetts Bay, and the Wampanoag, whose homeland reached north as far as what they called Wessagusset—the place English settlers would rename Weymouth. The Wampanoag homeland encompassed some 67 villages and an estimated 40,000–45,000 people before European contact brought epidemic disease and displacement that fractured communities across the region.
European settlement gave way, centuries later, to a military installation commissioned in 1942 and purpose-built to house blimps tasked with spotting German submarines along the New England coast. The station evolved during the Cold War and in 1954 became the home base for the blimps of an early warning program. The station transitioned to a Naval Air Reserve facility when the Navy retired its blimp fleet in 1961, and the vast airship hangars were demolished in the mid-1960s to make room for airplanes.
The end came in September 1996, when the Base Realignment and Closure Act triggered operational shutdown, and the aircraft departed for Naval Air Station Brunswick in Brunswick, Maine. The Navy formally closed the installation in 1997, and the future of the land came into question. What remained, invisible beneath the soil, was decades of firefighting foam seepage laced with PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) compounds. Groundwater testing revealed contamination at concentrations far above safe thresholds, and the site was designated a federal Superfund site, with ongoing remediation now entering its third decade.
Map of Shea Airfield, Weymouth.
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