“No bird soars in a calm.”

—Wilbur Wright, 1901

1914

The Great Flood

The 1903 flyer had been dismantled and packed away. The wooden crates stored in Dayton, Ohio, behind the bike shop in the shed looked like nothing. The crates were not marked and had been there for eleven years. The shed held bicycle parts, bicycles, wheels, tires, 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. Rain leaked down onto the crates occasionally from the roof. The men who had put the crates in the shed had long since forgotten them. Wilbur had died in 1912, and Orville was busy and traveling. So the crates with sand in the bottom from 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, remained silently moldering.

The rain began on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1914. Dayton, Ohio, was a sitting duck positioned between the intersection of the Miami, Stillwater, and Mad Rivers, along with Wolf Creek, which was always flooding. Already six times before, waters had rampaged through the streets of Dayton. This would be the worst, with torrential rains blanketing the area, swelling the rivers and creeks, and meeting in downtown Dayton. Then the earthen dam of the Laramie Reservoir in Shelby County collapsed, sending a wall of water surging toward Dayton. A levee along Stratford Avenue breached at four o'clock on Monday, with more breaks along East Second and Fifth Avenues.1 The Wright home and bike shop were in the crosshairs, and so was the shed. So was the flyer.