For 40 years before 1970, this beacon in Zion View told pilots flying without radar that they were six miles from York and 18 miles from Harrisburg, according to Norma Bear Gates.
The beacon defined the village.
Anyone from Conewago Township's Zion View could locate their town by saying it was where the airplane beacon was located.
That is, until 1970, when the beacon, which welcomed planes flying without radar, came down.
In "More about ... the way it was, Zion View: a country village," Norma Bear Gates explained that a Druck Valley farm equipment and machinery collector, Floyd Miller, cut down the tower and hauled it to his home. A farmer from Lancaster County later bought the tower, possibly to be used as a windmill stand.
Miller kept two small lights formerly atop the tower, Gates wrote.
That beacon might have attracted a small plane in distress seeking a safe place to land in post-War War II Zion View... .
A fence helped save the lives of a man and woman in this plane crash in Zion View, according to Norma Bear Gates.
According to Gates, farmer Jim Hooper heard the roar of the plane and tried to signal a landing area on his farm.
"Fortunately, a fence at the edge of the field sustained the plane's left wing, saving the lives of two occupants (the pilot and his wife) who were enroute to deliver this newly-built plane to its purchasers in Maryland," Gates wrotes.
It was Zion View's first - and only - plane crash, Gates noted.
The venerable beacon was designed to guide pilots on their flyways, she noted, but not in their landings.
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