The Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the Nineteen Nineteen Surplus Sale, and the Two-Dollar Ride That Introduced Rural America to Flight

The barnstorming era began not with adventure or ambition, but with a government inventory problem. When World War I ended in November 1918, the U.S. Army Air Service found itself holding thousands of surplus training aircraft and nowhere to put them. The solution - selling them off at a fraction of their original cost - put airplanes in private hands for the first time in history and changed American aviation permanently.

What Was the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny?

The airplane at the center of this story was the Curtiss JN-4D, built by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company of Hammondsport, New York. Everyone in aviation called it the Jenny.

During the war, Curtiss and its licensed manufacturers produced approximately 6,300 Jennies, almost exclusively as training aircraft. Most never saw combat. Most never left American soil. When the Armistice was signed, the military needed them gone - and fast.

The Jenny’s specifications were modest by design: a 44-foot wingspan, fabric-covered wood frame, and a Curtiss OX-5 water-cooled V-8 engine producing 90 horsepower. It cruised at roughly 75 miles per hour and topped out at roughly 75 miles per hour, leaving almost no margin between comfortable and flat out.

What the Jenny lacked in performance it made up in temperament. It was a forgiving airplane. It didn’t snap into a spin at the first provocation - it telegraphed problems before they arrived. For a pilot flying low over strangers with no safety net, that characteristic wasn’t a convenience. It was survival.

How Did the 1919 Surplus Sale Work?

Beginning in 1919, the War Assets Administration began offloading surplus military aircraft at prices that seem almost absurd in retrospect. Jennies that had cost the government close to $5,000 each to build were selling for $200 to $500.

For the first time in history, a private individual with a modest bank account could buy an airplane. Not a wealthy industrialist or a government program - a veteran with mustering-out pay and a willingness to figure out the rest. They bought Jennies by the hundreds.

How Barnstorming Actually Worked

The business model was simple. A pilot would find a farmer or landowner willing to offer a pasture for the afternoon, put up a few handmade signs in town, and open for business. Sometimes the marketing was a borrowed car driven down main street with the horn going.

The standard rate was $1.50 for a fifteen-minute ride. Sometimes $2. In a lean county during a dry summer, sometimes fifty cents. Crowds came reliably, because in the early 1920s most rural Americans had never seen an airplane up close - and here was one, right in the meadow outside of town, close enough to touch.

The first ride was genuinely transformative. Open cockpit, slipstream, the smell of castor oil and dope lacquer, the OX-5’s ragged idle giving way to the grass falling away below. From two thousand feet above an Indiana cornfield, the farmer saw his own land from above for the first time - the river in the bottomland, the church steeple in town, the road he drove every week and finally understood how it connected to everything around it.

That experience, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people between 1919 and the late 1920s, created aviation’s first mass audience.

The OX-5 Engine: The Barnstormer’s Constant Companion

The Curtiss OX-5 deserves its own mention. It ran hot. It leaked coolant in ways that kept pilots guessing. It had a sincere tendency to throw rocker arms at exactly the wrong moments.

Pilots who flew behind OX-5 engines developed a finely tuned sensitivity to subtle changes in engine sound - and an absolute, non-negotiable habit of identifying a usable emergency field before they needed one on every single flight.

That habit still applies.

Who Were the Barnstormers?

They came from everywhere. Veterans who had trained in the military and couldn’t face the idea of grounding themselves. Farm boys who had scraped together enough for a Jenny on credit and taught themselves through trial and hard landings. Women who had found aviation before the war and refused to be grounded by peace.

They lived hard. They slept under their wings and ate when the gate was good. Winter touring meant open cockpits in sub-freezing temperatures - pilots layered in flying suits with newspaper stuffed underneath as insulation, arriving at destinations too cold to climb out of the cockpit. The OX-5 could overheat in summer and freeze in winter, and the Jenny offered no redundancy that made either comfortable.

If the engine quit on takeoff, a decision had to be made in the first three seconds. Fence or field. Ditch or barn. You made the call.

Wing-Walking, Parachutes, and the Aerial Circus

Barnstormers discovered quickly that spectacle drew larger crowds and larger gates. Wing-walking became the most visible act: performers climbed out of the cockpit in flight, worked along the wing using purpose-built hand and foot holds, and stood upright on the upper surface while the aircraft flew. Some went further - hanging by their knees from the landing gear, doing handstands at 2,500 feet.

Ormer Locklear of Greenville, Texas became the era’s most famous wing-walker. He had refined the technique as a military instructor, turned it into a professional career, and then a film career - real aerial stunts for silent pictures, no camera tricks, no painted backdrops.

Locklear died in 1920 at age 28 while filming a night sequence for the silent film The Skywayman. Ground-level floodlights meant to illuminate the finale disoriented him in the dark. He flew straight in.

Parachutists were another fixture of the flying circus. A jumper would climb out at altitude, hang from a strut or landing gear, and fall - with an early parachute requiring a manual ripcord pull. The first several hundred feet of freefall were an act of faith.

Charles Lindbergh did this. Before the Atlantic, before the Spirit of St. Louis, before “Lucky Lindy” meant anything outside rural America, Lindbergh was barnstorming the Midwest and the South. He sold rides. He made parachute jumps for circuit pay. He bailed out of stricken aircraft multiple times over his barnstorming years - not as a stunt, but because the OX-5 quit, the altitude ran out, and the parachute was the only option left.

How the Air Commerce Act of 1926 Changed Everything

By the mid-1920s, the federal government had taken notice of what was happening in the skies above rural America - concerned notice. Barnstorming crashes appeared regularly in local newspapers. Some were fatal. Some were spectacular enough to make the national wire. The heroic image aviation had spent a decade building was being complicated by images of crumpled fabric and broken spruce in someone’s alfalfa field.

In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act - the first serious federal attempt to regulate civil aviation in the United States. It established pilot licensing requirements, aircraft airworthiness certification standards, and federal authority to investigate accidents.

For barnstormers, the effects were mixed. Some of the more safety-conscious pilots in the business welcomed the structure, having watched the accident rate for years and knowing the free-for-all couldn’t last. Others resented the fees, the paperwork, and the inspectors who sometimes left with grounding orders. Either way, the certification process cost money - and by 1926, the Jenny was genuinely aging. Built as wartime trainers, many were on their third or fourth set of wings, held together by patches, repairs, and a brand of optimism that comes from not knowing when to stop.

The Great Depression finished what regulation had started. When money grew genuinely scarce, a $1.50 airplane ride became a luxury. The flying circuses packed up. Barnstormers found other work - in the young airline industry, the air mail service, the military, or back on the farms they had left behind.

Why the Barnstorming Era Still Matters

In the decade between the end of World War I and the onset of the Depression, barnstormers flew millions of Americans who would never have experienced flight any other way. They served rural counties that commercial airlines would not reach for another generation. They carried farmers and schoolteachers and shop clerks - and the children who would grow up to design the aircraft that won World War II.

The love affair between rural America and small airplanes - the one that shows up every July at Oshkosh, at Sun ’n Fun, at a thousand fly-ins at a thousand small airports from Maine to Alaska - started in a hay field. It started with a veteran in a worn leather jacket, ninety horsepower of uncertain temper behind him, asking a stranger if he could land.

The wing-walkers at modern airshows are direct descendants of that first barnstorming summer. The small-airport culture, where the owner walks out to chat and hands you a cold drink because that is simply what you do, is a world those pilots built. Not with regulations or infrastructure. With a Jenny, a few gallons of fuel, and the nerve to land somewhere nobody expected them.

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum collections on early American aviation history; Charles Planck’s research on the surplus aircraft era.

Key Takeaways

The 1919 War Assets Administration surplus sale made private aircraft ownership possible for the first time: Jennies that cost the government ~$5,000 to build sold for $200–$500.
The Curtiss JN-4 Jenny’s forgiving handling was central to its barnstorming success - it gave pilots warning before a dangerous situation became a fatal one.
Ormer Locklear of Greenville, Texas, was barnstorming’s most famous wing-walker; he died in 1920 at age 28 during the filming of The Skywayman.
Charles Lindbergh began his aviation career as a barnstormer, selling rides and making parachute jumps across the rural Midwest before his transatlantic flight.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 introduced the first federal oversight of civil aviation; the Great Depression ended the barnstorming era within a few years.
Barnstorming’s lasting legacy is cultural: it gave millions of ordinary Americans their first direct experience of flight and planted the grassroots aviation community that persists today.