Naval Air Station Squantum was an active naval aviation facility during 1917 and from 1923 until 1953. The original civilian airfield that preceded it, the Harvard Aviation Field, dates back to 1910. The base was sited on Squantum Point in the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. It also abutted Dorchester Bay, Quincy Bay, and the Neponset River.

Early military usage of the airfield dates to the early months of U.S. involvement in World War I when the Massachusetts Naval Militia (a forerunner to the United States Naval Reserve) built a small wooden seaplane hangar and pier on the Dorchester Bay shoreline adjacent to the former Harvard Aviation Field. Primary flight instruction was provided at the Massachusetts School for Naval Air Service, as the tiny seaplane base was originally called, to members of the Massachusetts Naval Militia who would subsequently go on to take advanced flight training at the Navy's flying school at Pensacola, Florida. In May 1917 the Navy took the seaplane base over and evicted the Sturtevant Aeroplane Company from the former Harvard Aviation Field as well. The Navy continued to use the U.S. Naval Air Station Squantum as a primary flight training facility until the end of September 1917 when all naval flight training activity was consolidated in areas of the country with better year-round flying weather.

Thereafter, much of land surrounding the former seaplane base and Harvard Aviation Field was taken over by the Navy Department for the construction of a new shipyard called the Victory Destroyer Plant. The Victory Plant, which was owned by the government but operated by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, was designed specifically to mass-produce one type of ship, the Clemson-class destroyers. A total of 35 were built at the Victory Plant before the shipyard closed on 1 June 1920.

During the summer of 1923 then-Lieutenant Richard E. Byrd, with the assistance of a group of volunteer Navy veterans of the First World War, helped found the NRAS (Naval Reserve Air Station) at Squantum Point using the disused First World War seaplane hangar, which had remained more-or-less intact after the Victory Plant shipyard was built. NRAS Squantum, which was commissioned on 15 August 1923, is considered to have been the first air base in the Naval Reserve program.

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