Charles Lindbergh Crash Site #2
Covell, Illinois
Less than two months after Charles Lindbergh, an air mail pilot, crashed outside of Sulphur Springs, Illinois, he was again trapped in bad weather over the Land of Lincoln with no place to land himself. On the night of November 3, 1926, with his gas gauge on "E," Lindbergh flew as far as he could out over the country near Covell and bailed out at 13,000 feet. The plane crashed only a hundred yards behind a farm house, but the weather was so bad that no one realized it until the next morning. Lindbergh landed on a barbed-wire fence.
It was while he was being driven to town by a local farmer -- cold, wet, battered and bruised -- that he reportedly first considered switching careers. Six months later, he flew nonstop from New York to Paris and became an international hero.
The crash sight was marked by a tower built by the farmer, Charles Thompson, but it was eventually torn down. Then in 1977 a local stamp club, The Corn Belt Philatelic Society, put up a small brick cairn with a bronze plaque at the site. For many years this was the only Lindbergh crash marker in Illinois, until it was joined in 2001 by a marker at the Sulpher Springs site.
Lindbergh was so famous in his day that towns put up markers to him even in places where he didn't crash: Lake Village, Arkansas (he made an emergency landing on the golf course); Maben, Mississippi (he landed and damaged his propeller); and Spearman, Texas (he landed to eat lunch). His enduring fame made possible the latter-day monuments in Illinois, and the Lindbergh Crate Museum in Canaan, Maine, where the packing crate that held Lindbergh's New-York-to-Paris plane was turned into a motivational attraction.