For a dollar, you can buy a coffee in some places. On the Oregon coast, it bought one of the largest wooden buildings on Earth.
Hangar B in Tillamook, a vast timber shed built in 1943 to house US Navy blimps, was sold for $1 to the Vintage Aviation Museum, a nonprofit based in Utah, after a winter storm tore open its roof and left its owner unwilling to pay for repairs. The new owner now plans to reopen the Tillamook Air Museum inside on Thursday, October 29, almost a year after it closed.
A building made of a forest
Hangar B is roughly 1,072 feet long and 296 feet wide, covers more than seven acres and spans its width without a single supporting column. It was put up in less than a year, using about 3.2 million board feet of Douglas fir because steel and concrete were scarce in wartime. It sheltered K-class airships that flew anti-submarine patrols off the West Coast. Its twin, Hangar A, burned down in 1992.
For more than 30 years the surviving hangar has housed the Tillamook Air Museum, whose aircraft include an F-14 Tomcat that appeared in the original Top Gun and an AV-8B Harrier II added in 2025.
From storm to sale
On 16 December 2025, a windstorm ripped a large section out of the roof and the museum shut its doors. In May the Port of Tillamook Bay, which owns the site, voted 4–1 against repairing it, citing a local share of about $1.3 million for the roof alone and full restoration estimates of $20 million or more.
In August the port’s board approved terms with the Vintage Aviation Museum, led by its president, Sean O’Brien. The museum pays $1 for the hangar, plus nominal sums for the old museum’s equipment, aircraft and the building’s liabilities, and takes a 25-year ground lease with options to extend twice. It buys the hangar as-is and takes on all maintenance, and it must secure $3 million in bonds before it can repair the damaged roof section.
The plan is to open the undamaged northern end first while work on the rest continues. O’Brien has said the building had “been in disrepair for far too many years”.
Why a dollar makes sense
A $1 sale sounds like a giveaway, but it is really a transfer of risk. The port, a public body, faced a bill it could not justify; a specialist nonprofit believes it can do the work faster and more cheaply, and gets a landmark that draws visitors in return. The open question is money: full restoration will take years of fundraising.
For now, the date to remember is October 29, when one of the strangest and most impressive buildings in America opens its doors again.
Further reading
- Tillamook Air Museum — Wikipedia
- Naval Air Station Tillamook — Wikipedia
- K-class blimp — Wikipedia
- Tillamook, Oregon — Wikipedia
Image: Cranialsodomy (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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