The Dayton Flight Factory: The Wright Brothers & the Birth of Aviation

WRIGHT SITES

DAYTON AVIATION HERITAGE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

Hawthorn Hill

Location: Oakwood. Hawthorn Hill is the Wright family mansion where Orville lived until his death in 1948. Dayton History manages the home and makes it accessible by scheduled tours from Carillon Historical Park.

Huffman Prairie Flying Field

Location: Gate 16A, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Huffman Prairie Flying Field is where the Wright brothers continued their flying experiments after 1903 and demonstrated practical flight in 1905. A replica shed, tower and launching track represent their experimental work. The field also includes an outline of the Wright Company’s hangar and a replica of the Simms Station platform nearby. Next to the flying field is a remnant of a native Ohio tall grass prairie. Huffman Prairie was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center and Wright Memorial

Location: 2380 Memorial Road, Wright-Patterson AFB. The interpretive center features exhibits focused on the Wright brothers’ development of the world’s first practical airplane, their flying school and subsequent accomplishments at Wright-Patterson. Adjacent to it is the Wright Memorial. Set in a shady, twenty-seven-acre park, the memorial is a seventeen-foot-tall granite obelisk surrounded by a stone plaza. It overlooks Huffman Prairie.

Paul Laurence Dunbar House

Location: 219 North Paul Laurence Dunbar Street. Dunbar purchased this house for his mother in 1904. He completed his last work there before his death in 1906. The house was designated an Ohio state memorial in 1936 and a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Dayton History manages the house and conducts scheduled tours from Carillon Park.

Wright Cycle Co.

Location: 22 South Williams Street. This building housed the Wright brothers’ fourth bicycle shop from 1895 to 1897. Their print shop was on the second floor. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

Wright-Dunbar Visitor Center

Location: 16 South Williams Street. The national park’s Wright-Dunbar Visitor Center occupies the renovated Hoover Block building at the corner of West Third and Williams. The exterior preserves the appearance of the old commercial district. The south side opens onto a plaza that leads to the bicycle shop. The facility houses an interpretive center, the Aviation Trail Parachute Museum and national park staff offices.

Wright Flyer III and Carillon Historical Park

Location: 1000 Carillon Boulevard. The original 1905 Wright Flyer III is on display in Dayton History’s Wright Brothers Aviation Center at Carillon Historical Park. The center includes a replica of the bicycle shop and other exhibits. The airplane was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990 and a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 2003.

OTHER WRIGHT SITES

Deeds Point

Location: Confluence of the Mad and Great Miami Rivers in downtown Dayton. Deeds Point is a Five Rivers Metro Park. Two bronze statues on a small plaza portray Orville twisting a bicycle inner tube box as Wilbur explains his scheme for warping wings. Website: http://metroparks.org/Parks/DeedsPoint.

Engineers Club of Dayton

Location: 110 East Monument Avenue. Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering formed the Engineers Club in 1914 as a gathering place for Dayton’s growing community of scientists and engineers. Orville Wright was a member. The stately clubhouse at 110 East Monument Avenue in the center city has a full-scale Wright Flyer III sculpture on a plaza next to it and an original Wright flyer engine on display inside. Website: http://engineersclub.org.

Harry Toulmin Statue

Location: Fountain Square, Springfield. Springfield remembers Harry Toulmin, the attorney who wrote the Wright brothers’ flying machine patent, with a bronze statue on Fountain Square in the center of town. It faces the historic Bushnell Building where Toulmin had his office.

National Aviation Hall of Fame

Founded in 1962, the National Aviation Hall of Fame was chartered by Congress in 1964 to honor aviators and others who helped make the United States a great nation through outstanding contributions to aviation. Wilbur and Orville were the first two enshrinees; more than two hundred have been inducted since then, including seventeen people mentioned in this book: Henry H. “Hap” Arnold (enshrined in 1967), Neil Armstrong (1979), Thomas Scott Baldwin (1964), Glenn Curtiss (1964), Octave Chanute (1963), Charles F. Kettering (1979), A. Roy Knabenshue (1965), Samuel Langley (1963), Frank Lahm (1963), Grover Loening (1969), Thomas Selfridge (1965), Glenn L. Martin (1966), Elmer and Lawrence Sperry (1973, 1981), Charles Taylor (1965) and Wilbur and Orville Wright (1962). Information and exhibits about the enshrinees are in NAHF’s Learning Center, which adjoins the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (below). Website: http://nationalaviation.org.

National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

Location: 1100 Spaatz Street, Wright-Patterson AFB. The Wright brothers exhibit in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force’s Early Years gallery includes a replica wind tunnel, balances, charts and other tools Wilbur and Orville used in their laboratory research. The museum also displays a sample of original fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, a replica of the 1909 Military Flyer and an original, highly modified 1911 Model B. Website: http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil.

Orville Wright’s Laboratory Site

Location: 15 North Broadway. A small park occupies the site of Orville Wright’s laboratory just north of West Third and a half block west of the bicycle shop site. The park includes a replica of the building’s façade with an open doorway and a walking path that leads to a statue of Orville.

Triumph of Flight Monument (Planned)

Triumph of Flight is a planned iconic monument that would perch a three-times-life-sized sculpture of the 1905 Wright Flyer III on a tower as tall as the Statue of Liberty at the Interstate 70–75 interchange north of Dayton. Its base would include a reflecting pool and a memorial park. The nonprofit Wright Image Group, Inc. is planning and raising funds for the multimillion-dollar project. The group believes the monument, viewed by millions of motorists every year, would brand Dayton and Ohio internationally as the birthplace of aviation. Website: http://wrightmonument.org.

Woodland Cemetery

Location: 118 Woodland Avenue. Woodland Cemetery is the final resting place of the Wright brothers, Paul Laurence Dunbar and many of Dayton’s most prominent citizens. Founded in 1841, the two-hundred-acre cemetery is also one of the nation’s five oldest rural garden cemeteries. Its hilltop lookout, just south of downtown, offers a rare view of the Miami Valley. Website: http://woodlandcemetery.org.

Wright “B” Flyer, Inc.

Location: 10550 North Springboro Pike, Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport. The all-volunteer, not-for-profit Wright “B” Flyer, Inc. flies a modern lookalike of a 1911 Wright Model B Airplane. It also displays a nonflying close replica of a Model B. The Flying “B” has circled the Statue of Liberty, flown over the Rose Bowl and been displayed across the country and in Germany. Its non-flying replica has been displayed at major international venues, including the Farnborough International Air Show. Honorary aviator members are eligible for a free orientation hop on the one-of-a-kind airplane. Website: http://wright-b-flyer.org.

Wright Company Factory Site

Location: West Third Street at Abbey Avenue. The original Wright Company factory stands about 1.4 miles west of the Wright-Dunbar neighborhood. At this writing it was privately owned and not open to the public. In 2009, federal legislation expanded the national park’s boundary to include the factory, attached buildings and surrounding acreage. The twenty-acre historic parcel adjoins a larger industrial site that’s being prepared for redevelopment with a mix of public and private funds. The National Aviation Heritage Alliance is working with the National Park Service and others to fund the acquisition and restoration of the factory and redevelop three similar attached buildings with complementary activities, such as science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs, sport aircraft construction, aerospace research and development or light aerospace manufacturing. Website: http://wrightfactory.org.

Wright Family Home Site and Wright Cycle Shop Site

Locations: 7 Hawthorn Street, 1127 West Third Street. The Wright Cycle Company shop and the Wright family home are now in the Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The bicycle shop site is preserved as a grassy lot between commercial buildings from the same time period. Plans to construct a memorial on the site await funding. A replica of the house’s front porch and a walkway that follows the outline of the house marks the home site. An iron fence surrounding the site includes a sculpture of a bicycle leaning against it, as seen in a historic photo. A private home on the opposite side of Hawthorn was built to resemble the Wright home.

Wright State University, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library

Location: 3640 Colonel Glenn Highway, Wright State University. Established in the 1960s next to Wright-Patterson AFB, Wright State University is the namesake of the Wright brothers, and its main library is named in memory of Paul Laurence Dunbar. WSU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives includes a rich collection of Wright artifacts, papers and photographs, as well as other collections related to the Wright family, aviation history and the history of the Dayton region. A full-scale replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer hangs in the Dunbar Library’s atrium. In 2014, the university was raising funds for a new building to house its archives. Website: http://libraries.wright.edu/special.