It's easy to forget, in this digital age, just how valued sketch artists continued to be long after the development of photography.

The sketch allows for perspective, detail, and emphasis oftentimes lost to lighting conditions by the camera and human eye. Thus the fellow handy with paint brush, ink-and-pen, and pastel could sketch everything from scientific textbooks to advertisements to cartoons and find adequate compensation for his craft.

One of those was Eric Sloan (1905-85). Famous for his sketches of tools, farming implements, barns, covered bridges, and all things quintessentially Americana and evocative of Currier and Ives, Sloan's work first attracted my attention courtesy of a copy of The ABC Book of Early Americana (1963), which came into my possession some years ago via a garage sale in Albany. Here, accompanying richly detailed sketches, we learn that Charles Burton invented the first baby carriage in 1848, that the first rain boots were unvulcanized rubber shoes from 1820, that mufflers were first used by men in the 1700s not to warm hands but to keep ink and other cold-sensitive items warm on cold days, and that Benjamin Franklin installed the first lightening rod on is house in Philadelphia. Sloan's portfolio  is a treasure trove of ploughs, washboards, awls, hat blocks, blacksmith tools, and cobbler's stock-in-trade; items that captured the transition from homespun and sail to steam and rail.    

Sometime in the middle of the 1930s, Sloan began painting numbers on aircraft at rural airfields and became sufficiently impressed by the newness of aviation technology - or, perhaps, the old pioneer spirit still alive in aviators - that he began to turn his eye, and sketch pad, on some of the local airports that operated in the heart of Nassau County in the days before the Baby Boom and stampede of suburbanites; the world of crop-dusters, biplanes, barn-stormers, old aces who shared the skies with the Red Baron, and the proverbial daring young men (and quite a few women) in their flying machines. And this brought him to what would become Levittown.

Often thought to be nothing but nondescript potato fields before V-J Day, the Jerusalem/Island Trees area (as Levittown was then called) had much acreage given over to nonagricultural uses and, in the years between the Armistice and Pearl Harbor, the farm country was dotted with dirt-landing-strip-and-wooden-hanger operations. Nassau Airport, for example, operated on Hempstead Turnpike next door to the Robricht farm where St. Bernard's Church is today; its wooden hanger became the original worship-space in 1947 when the Archdiocese of Brooklyn created the parish and the Robricht house became the church rectory building.

Pilots also flew out of LWF airfield where Target is currently located and refueled at Gulf Field near present-day Violet Lane and Orchid Roads - behind the grandstand of the old Vanderbilt Motor Parkway. The largest of these fields, however, was the Long Island Aviation Country Club, one of Charles Lindbergh's old haunts which provided hanger space and overnight lodgings for aviators and which became the neighborhood about Blacksmith Road after Levitt & Sons bought the property in 1950.    

Sloan sketched pictures of aircraft at these fields in addition to Brooklyn's Floyd Bennet Field and Garden City's Roosevelt Field and although most of his original work has been preserved at the Sloan-Stanley Tool Museum in Kent, Connecticut, one 1938 depiction of planes at Roosevelt Field found a home in Levittown after hanging up, throughout the war years, behind the bar at the Roosevelt Field Inn. It was later acquired by Sigfried Uyldert, a pilot and flight instructor back in the 1930's who proudly hung it on the wall of his Levitt & Sons  Ranch house he purchased back in 1948.   

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit levittownhistoricalsociety.org.