Coffeyville Aviation Heritage Museum

Housed in a 1933 hangar at Coffeyville’s former Big Hill Airport, the Coffeyville Aviation Heritage Museum occupies a structure that is itself a surviving artifact of early regional aviation infrastructure. Now known formally as the Emil W. Roesky, Jr. Memorial Aviation Heritage Museum, it reflects decades of local effort to document how a small Kansas community intersected with wider civil and military aviation trends. Exhibits on the Funk Aircraft Company highlight a homegrown manufacturer and its engines, illustrating how modest workshops contributed practical designs to mid-20th-century flying. Material relating to Coffeyville Army Air Field anchors the site in the World War II training network, where dispersed airfields prepared crews and support personnel for wartime service far from the coasts. For military history enthusiasts, the value lies in tracing these interlocking stories—industry, training, and local airfield operations—within an intact period hangar, where preservation work must constantly negotiate between conserving original fabric and accommodating evolving interpretive needs.