Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Beginning early in 1929, Gilman spent $27,500 to accomplish that task. The area was fenced to keep the hogs and cattle out, then covered with a two-inch layer of straw, leaf, and wood mold extending 300 feet up the slope. Tough, hardy imported grasses—bitter tannic, hairy vetch, and marram—were planted in the artificial topsoil. Once this band of vegetation took root, Gilman extended the planting up to the summit on the northeast side where the prevailing wind struck the dune, then over the rest of the slope.
By the summer of 1930, the majestic moving dune was transformed into a stable hill, carpeted with green weeds and shrubs. A few watermelon vines even found a foothold near the top. Gilman and his crew started work on the monument itself in February 1931. Finished the following spring, the granite shaft measured sixty feet from the
five-pointed star at the base to the tip of the beacon. The hill raises the total height of the structure to 151 feet above sea level.
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On November 19, 1932, another party of distinguished guests made their way over the new Wright Memorial Bridge and down a concrete highway to attend the dedication of the finished monument. Warren’s plan to use the monument to lure tourists to the Outer Banks was an enormous success—development followed on a scale beyond his wildest dreams. Wilbur and Orville Wright would no longer recognize the string of neon-bedecked motels, restaurants, gift shops, condominiums, and elegant beach houses that lines the route to their old camp.
During the twenties and thirties memorials to the Wrights sprang up virtually everywhere the brothers had worked and flown, including College Park, Maryland; Fort Myer, Virginia; and Montgomery, Alabama. Wilbur’s birthplace, a farmhouse near New Castle, Indiana, became a state historic park. Local historical groups in Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia marked the sites of the various Wright homesteads. But Henry Ford’s purchase of the house at 7 Hawthorn and the bicycle shop at 1127 West Third marked the beginning of the most important preservation project involving the Wright brothers.
Henry Ford, who had made his fortune on the shop floors of urban Detroit, was convinced that his success was based on unyielding adherence to the precepts of an older America. A confirmed social engineer, he saw the historic village and museum as a means of passing on the strength of simple rural virtue to a new generation.
Ford began his recreation of the past by restoring the old Ford farm and homestead to its condition in 1876, the year in which his mother died. That project was followed in 1923 by the purchase and restoration of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
The Wayside Inn project has been celebrated as a major step in the historic preservation movement. It was an important step in Ford’s thinking as well, demonstrating the educational value of a restored complex, including a famous building, a working farm, an old-time school, and quaint shops.
But the history of colonial and early nineteenth-century America was of little interest to Ford. He was convinced that his own past—the lives of ordinary, hardworking Americans of the post-Civil War era—represented the nation’s Golden Age. Greenfield Village was designed to capture Ford’s roseate memories of those years.
It took shape in an empty field near the Ford engineering laboratory, a mile or so from the huge River Rouge plant. There were two
components: a vast museum filled with the objects of American industry and everyday life; and a village made up of historic structures gathered from across the nation. The entire complex would illustrate the way in which the men and women of Ford’s generation had applied rural values in building a new industrial America.
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Ford was a firm believer in the “Great Man” theory of history, and he thought there was no greater man than Thomas Alva Edison. He named his historic complex the Edison Institute, and moved both the laboratory in which Edison had worked for forty years at Fort Myers, Florida, and the buildings at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where the great man and his team had developed the electric light, onto the site.
By 1936, Greenfield Village—the outdoor-museum portion of the Institute—was taking shape. It included a few traditional American buildings, such as the Stephen Foster, William Holmes McGuffey, and Noah Webster houses, but concentrated chiefly on fledgling business and industry—a pottery, sawmill, blacksmith and tinsmith shops, a Cape Cod windmill, cooper shop, mine-pumping engine, and machine shop.
In choosing his American heroes, Ford avoided the traditional emphasis on political leaders and military men, although he did acquire an Illinois courthouse associated with Abraham Lincoln. Luther Bur-bank’s birthplace and laboratory and Charles Steinmetz’s camp seemed more appropriate to him.
Buildings representing Wilbur and Orville Wright fit perfectly into the scheme of Greenfield Village, but the acquisition of the Wright home and bicycle shop owed far more to Detroit newsman William E. Scripps than it did to Henry Ford. Scripps, an aviation enthusiast who served as president of the Early Birds, a national club for pioneer aviators, had long dreamed of a facility where the papers and memorabilia of fliers could be preserved. That project never materialized, but his early discussions with Ford did achieve results.
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The first sign that something was afoot came with Orville’s initial visit to Greenfield Village on June 27, 1936. Then, on July 2, Charles Webbert, the Wrights’ old landlord, sold the building at 1127 West Third to Ford for $13,000. The Dayton
Daily News
broke the story four days later.
Reaction in Dayton was mixed. Some congratulated Ford on acquiring a historic structure that would probably not have been preserved if left in the hands of local citizens. Others were less pleased. “It is an outrage to let a thing like this happen,” argued Judge James
Douglas of the Court of Common Pleas. “First England takes the first airplane and now Henry Ford takes the original workshop….”
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Henry Ford and his son Edsel paid their first visit to Dayton with Fred Black, the man in charge of Greenfield Village, on October 27. They saw the old bike shop while it was still in place, and discussed plans for its removal and restoration with Orville. The Fords also discovered that the house at 7 Hawthorn might be available. Orville could not understand the Fords’ interest in so undistinguished a building, but promised to see what he could do.
Milton had willed the house to Katharine, who sold it to Lottie Jones, the washerwoman who had worked for them on Hawthorn Street. Within a month Orville had arranged the sale for $4,100.
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Edward Cutler, Ford’s preservation specialist, arrived in Dayton to make drawings and photos of both buildings in October. Ford workmen had marked, disassembled, moved, and reassembled them on new foundations in Greenfield Village by February 1937.
Furnishing the interior of the house and shop proved more difficult than expected. Orville provided a few pieces and a great many of the books from the house on Hawthorn Street. Lottie Jones had preserved some additional items in the house itself. She and her sons milked the Ford establishment for all it was worth, sending several shipments of “newly discovered” material to Detroit on consignment. Fred Black finally returned to Dayton to request a complete list of everything available, so that he could make his selection and reach a financial agreement with the family.
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The Ford organization located Charlie Taylor, working in the tool-room at North American Aviation in Los Angeles, and hired him to participate in restoring the bicycle shop. He helped Orville and Mabel Beck to locate surviving machine tools used in the shop at the turn of the century, then signed on as a guide once the buildings were opened to the public.
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The house and bicycle shop were dedicated with appropriate ceremony on April 16, 1938—Wilbur’s birthday. Charles Kettering, now head of the General Motors Laboratory, served as toastmaster. Frank Lahm, Griffith Brewer, and Walter Brookins also spoke briefly. That Sunday evening, the Ford Hour radio program ran a special tribute to the Wrights.
The buildings are still in Greenfield Village. You can stand in the room where Orville was born in 1871, and the one in which Wilbur died in 1912, or peek into the workshop where a kite, three gliders, and
three powered flying machines took shape between 1900 and 1905. The furnishings, particularly those in the typically overstuffed turn-of-the-century Sunday parlor, offer a sense of middle-class life and the taste of the times.
There are personal touches as well. Orville’s mandolin leans against a wall of the sitting room, as though he has just walked out the door. “Orv began lessons on the mandolin,” Katharine wrote their father not long before Wilbur left for Kitty Hawk in 1900. “We are getting even with the neighborhood at last for the noise they have made on pianos. He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”
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The interiors of the two buildings have been meticulously restored. It is only when you walk outside that you realize how completely Henry Ford succeeded in transplanting the two structures into an environment of his own imagining. Set on a generous plot of neatly manicured grass, framed by shrubs and trees, the Wright home and the world’s most famous bicycle shop have become central features of Ford’s idealized vision of small-town America. The reality of West Dayton—the sense of bustle and activity, change, opportunity, and excitement that marked the streetcar suburb in which the Wrights lived and worked—is entirely absent.
Dayton had lost its two most historic buildings, but it did eventually get its great monument. It stands just where Fred Marshall thought it should, on the high bluff overlooking Huffman Prairie, two miles to the east. Dedicated on August 19, 1940, Orville Wright’s sixty-ninth birthday, the memorial is a multifaceted thirty-foot shaft of pink North Carolina marble. General “Hap” Arnold flew in for the occasion and told his audience that the monument would “stand as a shrine to aviation as the Plymouth Rock is to America.”
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You can stand at the stone rail behind the monument and see Huffman Prairie off in the distance. It is one of the few places of importance in the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright that has not changed much since their time. Torrence Huffman leased the Prairie, and 2,075 additional acres which included both the Beard and Stauffer farms, back to the original owners, the people of the United States, on May 22, 1917. All of this land was incorporated into Wilbur Wright Field, a base where the first generation of American combat airmen received their basic training. By the end of 1917, eleven squadrons were operating eighty-five Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies,” and thirty-two Standard S-1 training aircraft in the neighborhood of the last Wright hangar, which remained standing into the mid-1920s.
Together with Fairfield Air Depot and the Air Service Engineering Division headquarters at McCook Field in Dayton, Wilbur Wright became a center of American flight research during the years following World War I. Air Service test pilots flew the giant six-engine NBL-1, the Barling Bomber, here when the runways at McCook Field proved too short. The talented cadre of engineers and technicians at Wilbur Wright prepared the Douglas DWC World Cruisers for the first circumnavigation of the globe, and the Fokker “Bird of Paradise” for the first flight from the mainland to Hawaii.
Of course, there was a price to be paid. Lieutenants Frank Stuart Patterson and Leroy Swann were killed in a DH-4 crash on June 19, 1918. Lieutenant Alexander Bliss II died while practicing for the 1924 Pulitzer Race. The wooden propeller of Captain Burt Skeel’s Curtiss racer shattered as he dived toward the starting line a few days later. Horrified spectators saw the machine burst apart in the air and fall to earth just outside the boundary of what had once been Huffman Prairie.
Most of the test flying was transferred to nearby Wright Field when that facility replaced old McCook in 1927. In an effort to avoid confusion, Wilbur Wright was renamed Patterson Field in 1931. The two bases were finally merged to form Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in January 1948.
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Like the previous owners, the U.S. Air Force has been hardpressed to find a use for the old Prairie. For many years it served as a safety zone beyond the officers’ club skeet range. Occasional proposals to turn the area into a bomb dump or an emergency pull-off ramp for aircraft that run into trouble out on the main runway have not been pursued.
They used to mow the Prairie regularly each summer. Local ecologists have convinced base officials to put a stop to that, and the area has gradually resumed its former appearance. There are plans to burn the field periodically, a process that will drive out intruding plant species and encourage the growth of indigenous native flora.
In the end, Huffman Prairie is the most appropriate of all monuments to the memory of Wilbur and Orville Wright—the spot where they first flew, preserved inviolate and surrounded by a giant research complex dedicated to the advancement of flight technology. A visit to the imposing granite shaft up on Wright Hill seems uninspiring compared with the opportunity to retrace their footsteps down here in the tall grass where it all began.
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or thirty years Orville Wright’s place of business was the plain brick building he had constructed on North Broadway. Visiting reporters found it quite ordinary. There was a reception area for Miss Beck; an inner office with Orville’s desk, files, and drawing table; and a large work area that ran across the back of the building. Orville referred to this room as his laboratory. In fact, with the exception of a large wind tunnel capable of testing models at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, there was little to distinguish it from any other well-equipped machine shop.
Still, it was difficult to believe that the inventor of the airplane was not at work in his lab on some project that would eventually yield wonders for a grateful humanity. Orville summed it up in a story he told to his friend, Dayton clergyman Charles Seasholes. One morning while puttering around the shop he noticed two small boys peeking through an open window. One boy asked his companion what in the world Orville was doing. The other replied, with a note of derision in his voice: “Why, he’s inventing!”
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