When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Army had almost no trained combat pilots. An Army survey crew came to Southwest Florida searching for flat land, clear skies, and year-round flying weather, and they found it six miles southeast of Arcadia. Construction began in January 1918. Within weeks, some 90 buildings rose from the pastureland: fourteen hangars each housing four to eight aircraft, a hospital, six barracks holding 175 men apiece, and dozens of wooden structures for headquarters, maintenance, and officers' quarters. Enlisted men bivouacked in tents. The field was named for 1st Lieutenant Victor Carlstrom, an accomplished aviator. By March, the 107th and 108th Aero Squadrons had transferred in from Rich Field in Waco, Texas, and Carlstrom Field was operational.

Carlstrom served as an advanced school for pursuit pilots, offering an intensive six-week course with capacity for 400 students. Most of the training aircraft were Curtiss JN-4 Jennys, the ubiquitous biplane trainer of the war, but they did not fly in from Texas. They arrived disassembled in wooden crates, shipped by railcar to the Florida flatlands and rebuilt on site. The field also operated a sub-field called Valentine Field near Labelle in Lee County, named for 2nd Lieutenant Herman W. Valentine, who was killed in an airplane accident at Carlstrom on May 4, 1918. Among the cadets who completed training here was Junius Wallace Jones, who would rise to the rank of Major General and become the first Inspector General of the United States Air Force. An auxiliary facility called Dorr Field served as a sub-field for overflow squadrons.

Flight training in 1918 was extraordinarily dangerous. The Curtiss Jenny was forgiving by the standards of the day, but engine failures, mid-air collisions, and disorientation killed cadets regularly. Among those who trained at Carlstrom and the surrounding fields were Royal Air Force cadets sent to Florida from Britain as part of the wartime alliance. Twenty-three of them never went home. They are buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Arcadia, where a special marker recognizes their service. A ceremony is held in their memory each year on Memorial Day. The presence of these British graves in a small Florida town is a quiet reminder of how far the reach of the Great War extended, and how young its victims were.

When World War I ended suddenly on November 11, 1918, Carlstrom Field's future became uncertain overnight. Local officials argued that the outstanding combat record of Carlstrom-trained pilots in Europe and the area's ideal flying weather justified keeping the base open. It did not matter. Cadets already in training were allowed to finish their courses, but no new students arrived. The separate training squadrons consolidated into a single Flying School Detachment as personnel were demobilized, and Carlstrom closed by September 1919. The field saw a brief revival during World War II, but it too ended. The wooden hangars came down. The buildings decayed or were repurposed. In 2014, the state of Florida sold the property to Power Auto Corporation for a driver training facility and hotel.

Today, two of the original six hangars still stand, along with the mess hall, band shell, canteen, administration building, water and sewage plants, and two training buildings. The administration building carries a plaque placed during a 1992 refurbishment by the state of Florida, and a weary B-17 weather vane turns on its roof. Along Highway 31, the concrete pads where wooden hangars once stood are still visible. And across the highway, that concrete biplane outline remains, its shallow basin long dry, a ghost target for ghost pilots in ghost airplanes. Carlstrom Field trained the men who fought the first American air war, and then it returned to the landscape as if it had never been there at all.