If you want to know anything about T.F. Green Airport, Chester Browning is the guy to talk to. Chet, a retired photographer and West Warwick resident, has amassed a remarkable collection of material from the airport over the decades, including thousands of photos.

Browning grew up in Providence and attended Providence College, where he studied history and planned to spend his life in classrooms teaching. Photography was a hobby he picked up as a teenager, but in 1976, the state was hiring a photographer, and he applied, landing the job he would hold until he retired in 2009.

“It was the best job in the state,” he says. “Better than governor.”

Best of all for the aviation enthusiast, the job allowed him to work out of the state’s biggest airport. Browning’s office was located there in case he needed to jump on a helicopter or small plane to get somewhere quickly or take aerial photos.

As state photographer, Browning got to go on a lot of adventures, from meeting the queen of England to climbing the cables of the Newport Bridge.

“I worked under six governors, from Philip Noel to Don Carcieri” he said. “And I could tell you unbelievable stories about every one of them.”

The job required someone to be on call at all hours of the day. He spent a week aboard an oil rig and sailed on a tall ship from Philadelphia to Newport. “I loved the variety,” he says enthusiastically. “Tourism, forensics, meet and greets with the governors. It was something different every day.”

“I got offers to work in other states,” Browning reflects, “but I was a big frog in a little pond, and I liked that. And because Rhode Island is small I could make it home for dinner.”

Unfortunately, the position was eliminated when Browning retired.

“Photography used to be a craft,” he says. “It was an art. Then it became a task. Now it’s nothing. It’s a job that doesn’t exist anymore. People just use their phones.”

Since retiring, Browning has shifted his focus from taking new photographs to restoring old ones. He has two big projects at the moment.

One is revisiting a collection of about 260 glass lantern slides that were found in a box at West Warwick Public Library. In 1976, a librarian named Janice hired Browning to convert the slides into 35 mm prints as part of a bicentennial display in the library. These images showcased mills, businesses, and some of the city’s most prominent residents, taken between 1880 and 1930 by a photographer named Ward Smith. The project was unique to Browning for several reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that he and Janice later married. He is now digitizing the prints and plans to donate copies to both the West Warwick Public Library and the Pawtuxet Valley Preservation and Historical Society.

The other project is the airport images, a conversion and digitization project that Browning is doing for the Rhode Island State Archives.

During our conversation, Browning mentions a number of instances where Rhode Island—or the skies above Rhode Island—made aviation history. For instance, the oldest surviving aerial photograph in the world–and the successful aerial photo in the United States–was taken from a hot air balloon over Providence in 1860.

In 1919, the Navy completed the first transatlantic crossing by an aircraft, an NC-4 “flying boat” that was made by Herreshoff Manufacturing in Bristol.

The original Hillsgrove State Airport opened in 1931, built on 158 acres of swampland adjacent to Occupasstuxet Road, which was later renamed Airport Road. The airport is now operated by the quasi-public Rhode Island Airport Corporation, but for decades it was owned by the state. In fact, when it opened in 1931, it was the first state-run airport in the country.

In 1938, Hillsgrove was renamed after T.F. Green, a supporter of aviation and then-recent governor of Rhode Island. After serving two terms in the 1930s, Green later became a record-setter himself, serving in the United States senate until he was 93 years old, making in the oldest Senator in the country’s history. (This record was later broken.)

Browning says that in the early 1940s, before the airport was taken over by the Air Force during World War II, T.F. Green was the seventh biggest airport in the country. (The Hillsgrove Air Base became T.G. Green State Airport once again when the war ended in 1945.)

In 1961, a new terminal opened, shifting the airport’s address from Airport Road to Post Road. That building was replaced with the current Bruce Sundlun Terminal in the 1990s. After the 1961 terminal closed and abandoned, just days before it was set to be demolished, Browning took the afternoon off and collected all the signs from the airlines. He still has them.

Browning’s photo collection includes nearly a century of images of the airport and some of the many aircraft that have traveled through it, from the Stinson Model T that first landed in the early 1930s to the glamorous, pointy-nosed Concorde that arrived once (and only once) in 1988. He has about 20,000 photos in his aviation collection.

Browning says that his mentor was Arthur A. Carter, Jr., a federal highway official who loved airplanes.

“He had a phenomenal memory,” Browning says, adding that Carter could recite the tail numbers of passenger planes that flew through the airport decades earlier.

When Carter died in 2019, he left Browning with 330 cases of memorabilia and about 250,000 photographs. Browning says he spent his down time in 2020 cataloguing it all.

At the time of the interview, Browning was ready to give his October 15 talk at Warwick Library, where he was planning to use photographs and memorabilia he collected to tell the story of the airport’s first 65 years.

“You know, not everyone is interested in airplanes,” Browning says, a faint note of disbelief in his voice. “Younger people want to get where they’re going, they don’t care about the travel as part of the experience. They don’t care about comfort, they just want to arrive.”