Every Friday morning at 9, the coffee pot goes on at Lenhardt Airpark and somebody puts out a box of doughnuts. This has happened for so many decades that nobody bothers to advertise it anymore. Pilots just show up, some flying in over the grass strip, some driving in off South Meridian Road, and the hangar-talk starts whether the weather cooperates or not.
That ritual predates almost every airplane currently parked on the field. What has changed, and what most people who fly out of Hubbard's grass strip probably haven't put together, is that the airpark itself went up for sale earlier this year, and none of it slowed down.
The Field Changed Hands On Paper. Not Much Else Did.
A commercial real estate listing that surfaced this spring put Lenhardt Airpark on the market, including its leased hangars and roughly two acres of land still open for development. The listing describes over 75 total hangars on site, with 56 already committed to long-term leases and the remainder available month to month. Those long-term leases run on 270-year terms, a detail that tells you something about how this place was built: not as a speculative real estate play, but as a way for pilots to lock in a hangar for longer than any of them will be alive to use it.
The listing itself hasn't shown up in local news coverage, which is normal. Small general aviation airports change ownership more often than most residents realize, and it rarely makes the paper unless something about daily operations shifts. As of this writing, nothing at Lenhardt has. The Friday coffee still runs at 9. The fuel is still available around the clock to members. The clubhouse and common areas that the family has maintained for seven decades are still the reason people describe this field as having a stronger sense of community than a lot of places twice its size.
Four New Pilots In Thirteen Months
Here's the part that surprised me most: this is not a museum piece. In just over a year, the airpark's own news page recorded four separate pilot milestones, each with a name and a date attached.
- Noah Austin soloed at Lenhardt on January 18, 2025, and came back six months later, on July 22, 2025, to earn his Private Pilot's License. He's now working toward his Instrument and Commercial ratings.
- Evan Leland soloed on August 17, 2025, following in his father's footsteps as a pilot.
- Jesse Fitzpatrick passed his FAA checkride at Lenhardt on January 17, 2026, flying a Cessna 172 registered N3650L.
- Jerry Ratliff logged a first solo as well, part of the same steady trickle the field posts to its own site rather than a press release.
At least two of those four, Noah Austin and Jesse Fitzpatrick, trained under the same instructor and flew the same airplane. That's not a flight school with a fleet and a marketing budget. That's one Cessna 172 and one instructor producing new, licensed pilots on a cadence you'd expect from a much bigger operation. For a field with no residential lots and no advertising presence beyond its own website, that's a real training pipeline, not a hobby.
The Instructor Who Also Grows Your Christmas Tree
The instructor behind most of that pipeline is Tom Wrolstad, and he's a good example of how tightly this airpark is stitched into the rest of the valley's calendar rather than sitting apart from it.
Come November, Wrolstad isn't in the cockpit. He's running his family's U-Cut Christmas tree farm in Molalla, open weekends starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. Same person, same phone number, two completely different businesses that both depend on the Willamette Valley's seasonal rhythms. It's the kind of detail that never shows up in an FAA airport directory but says more about how life actually works around Hubbard than any runway length ever could.
Seventy Years, One Family, A Few Conflicting Dates
Last September, the family that has run Lenhardt Airpark since its earliest days threw a party to mark 70 years of the place. Over 100 pilots, friends, and family showed up. The Willamette Valley Big Band played. People danced on the grass. Terri Coleman, whose father Jack Lenhardt started the airport, cut the anniversary cake and reflected on the day.
"I'm really glad that we did this event because it commemorates his hard work," Coleman said.
The math on that 70-year figure is worth flagging, because it doesn't quite line up with other records of the field. Aviation databases list the airpark's formal establishment as November 1962, which would put its 60th anniversary somewhere around 2022, not its 70th in 2025. The family's own framing traces further back, to Jack Lenhardt's original purchase of a small parcel of land and the crop-dusting business he launched on it, likely in the mid-1950s, years before the airport itself took its current shape. Both dates are probably right, just measuring different starting points: one for when the land became a business, one for when it became the registered airport pilots know today. Lenhardt died in 2010, and Coleman and her siblings have run the field since, with her own daughter helping decorate tables for last year's celebration. Three generations, one Friday morning ritual, still running.
What This Means If You Fly Out Of Hubbard
None of this changes what Friday morning looks like. The coffee still goes on at 9. The Saturday breakfast and lunch flyouts still fill up, especially in good weather. The annual chapter barbecue is still a fixture on the calendar. If you already hangar an airplane here, or drop in most weeks for the hanger-talk, the for-sale listing is worth knowing about mostly because it explains why you might see more activity around the office in the coming months, not because anything about your Friday routine is at risk today.
If you're the kind of pilot who's been flying into Lenhardt for years and has started wondering what a property like this, or a home near one of the Willamette Valley's other airparks, actually involves from a real estate standpoint, that's a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who already understands how these fields work. Stacey McGhehey has spent years working with buyers and sellers across Yamhill, Polk, Marion, and Washington Counties, including the region's aviation-lifestyle properties, and can walk you through what ownership, leases, and access actually mean before you commit to anything.
For now, though, the coffee's still hot and the doughnuts are still free. Smile. Relax. Enjoy the Friday morning while it lasts, because at Lenhardt, it always has.
