The wooden crates in the shed behind the bike shop in Dayton looked like nothing. They were not marked, and they had been there for eleven years. The shed held bicycle parts, bicycles, wheels, tires, and tools. The large wooden crates were an imposition, really. They were bulky and took up a lot of the space. The floor of the shed offered no real protection against the elements. Occasionally, rain leaked down onto the crates from the roof. The men who had put the crates in the shed had long forgotten them. Wilbur had died in 1912, and Orville was busy. The crates with sand in the bottom from Kitty Hawk in 1903 remained silently moldering.

Floodwaters had rampaged through Dayton six times before, but on March 23, 1914, the worst flood was yet to come. The rain began and didn't stop. Dayton was a floodplain between the Miami, Mad, and Stillwater Rivers. And there was Wolf Creek, which added its own water to the torrent of floodwater racing through Dayton. The streets of Dayton became their own rivers, and then the Laramie Reservoir earthen dam collapsed and the levee at Stratford Avenue was breeched. A wall of water was headed for the Wright home and bike shop.

Orville and Katherine had left their home on Hawthorne Avenue that morning and found it impossible to return. Their father was trapped.1 They spent the night at a friend's house but were unable to contact their father. Phones were down, and fires had broken out all over the city from broken gas mains. A lurid glow was in the sky as the water rose steadily higher.² Hawthorne Street and other low-lying areas of Dayton were under eight feet of water. Orville was worried about his father, but he had other worries as well. As Tom Crouch pointed out in The Bishop's Boys, “The priceless photographic negatives of the flying machine experiments of 1900–1905 were in the old shed at the rear of the house. Letters, diaries, and other records of inventions of the airplane were stored in the second floor at the bicycle shop on Third Street where the water was said to be over twelve feet.”3 And then there were the crates in the shed behind the bike shop. These gave him the most concern of all, for in those crates was the 1903 Wright Flyer—the plane that had made human flight possible.

Bishop Wright was rescued, along with his neighbor Mrs. Wagner, by a man with a canoe. Orville and Katherine returned to devastation the next morning. The lives of 371 people had been lost, and property damage was estimated at $100 million.⁴ A reporter later described the damage of the direct hit that Dayton had taken:

The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with dirt that shows the height of the flood. But inside the houses, that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal festoons…. But the worst is the reek of death about the place.⁵

Orville went directly to the bicycle shop, which had been underwater. The glass-plate negatives had survived; a few of them had been damaged, but all were salvageable. The most important one, the photo taken by John Daniels showing the 1903 Flyer lifting off from the sand at Kitty Hawk on December 17, had been underwater but survived with slight damage. But what of the Flyer itself? Orville left the bicycle shop and saw the low shed. A thick mud encased the building and he had to scoop it away to get the door open.

The mud had entered the structure and covered the crates. Orville got down on his knees and scooped the muck off and pulled out the first crate. He opened it and stared down at the fabric-covered wings. Amazingly, the mud had acted as an insulator and kept the water out of the crates. The fabric was damp and the wood was wet, but it was undamaged. The only plane the Wright brothers had saved had been in danger of being swept away forever, but the 1903 Flyer had survived to fly one more time, in the Wright brothers’ biggest battle yet to come.

Orville and his secretary, Mabel Beck, tirelessly dried out the old Flyer in his laboratory and stretched the canvas over the frame. To Mabel, the canvas smelled of time and sand.6 In 1925, the Flyer would be unpacked again for a very different reason. Mabel at that time would write, “the original cloth was in bad shape, very frail and worn…. Mr. Wright decided to recover the machine with new cloth…. Mr. Wright and I laid out and cut all the cloth, and I did the sewing.”⁷ She worked alongside Orville, for hours and hours. The smell of the ocean had come into the room, and sand collected on the floor. At the end of the day, Mabel brushed away the grit of history. She had never seen the ocean and wondered about the place Orville talked about many times—Kitty Hawk. The name sounded like a magic bird to her.⁸