Introduction
If I were giving a young man advice on how he might succeed in life,"
Wilbur Wright once remarked, "I would say to him, 'Pick out a good
father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.'" Mr. Wright might have gone
one step farther, and suggested that Dayton, Ohio, the city where he
spent all of his adult life, had served as an extraordinarily effected
springboard to success for his brother and himself.
On the one hand, the Dayton of 1900 was, quite literally, the average
American city. The precise center of U.S. population had passed right
over the top of Dayton in 1870. Thirty years later, the 1900 census
placed Dayton at the statistical center of the top ten cities in the
state (5th) and the top 100 cities in the nation (45th). You just can't
get much closer to the statistical center of middle America than
turn-of-the-century Dayton.
In the fall of 1896, the citizens of the Gem City, as it was already
known, were enthusiastic participants in the three-day celebration
commemorating the centennial of Dayton. They restored the Newcom Tavern,
the oldest surviving structure in town, and moved it from its original
site to Van Cleve Park, on the banks of the Miami River, as a memorial
to their pioneer forebears. They turned out in huge numbers to enjoy a
series of fine parades, and a pageant, "Daytonia," retracing the
100-year history of Dayton.
But if the Daytonians of 1896 celebrated the past, they also sensed
that there were forces at work transforming their city into a place that
was very far from average. At the end of its first century, Dayton was
poised on the brink of unprecedented expansion and prosperity. The
population of the city had doubled in the decade between 1870 and 1880,
then increased another 60% to reach 80,000 in 1896. Daytonians found
employment in the literally hundreds of factories, machine shops and
foundries that dotted the city. Dayton was a national center for the
production of farm implements, bicycles, metal castings and railroad
cars.
The National Cash Register Company — "The Cash" — had already emerged
as Dayton's largest employer. John H. Patterson had purchased James
Ritty's patents for "the incorruptible cashier" in 1883. Just seven
years later, the man who would teach the entire nation the meaning of
the word salesmanship, was shipping 13,500 cash registers a year to the
far ends of the globe. Patterson placed special emphasis on patents, and
was an important factor in building Dayton's reputation as a center for
innovation and creativity in technology and commerce. According to the
U.S. Patent Office, Dayton had ranked fifth in the nation in terms of
patents granted per capita as early as 1870. Twenty years later, it led
the nation.
In the book that you hold in your hands, historian Ann Honious has
done a fine job of portraying the lives of the three most famous
Americans to emerge from the rich and complex environment that was
turn-of-thecentury Dayton. "Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Negro poet, and I
were close friends in our school days," Orville Wright explained many
years later. The two probably met for the first time in the fall of
1885, when Orville enrolled in the seventh grade following the return of
the Wright family to Dayton after several years of living in other parts
of the Middle West. His classmate, Paul Dunbar, had begun his education
at the segregated "colored grade school" on Fifth Street. So few African
American children continued beyond the elementary grades, however, that
Dayton's intermediate school was integrated until 1887. Paul Dunbar was
simply allowed to move on to Central High School, the last of what must
have been a mere handful of Black Daytonians to benefit from integrated
schools before Dayton descended into the age of Jim Crow.
Orville Wright and his friend Dunbar both dropped out of school in
1889, between their junior and senior years. Orville set himself up as a
printer, in partnership with his older brother Wilbur. Among other
projects, they subsidized and published the Dayton Tattler, a
five-column weekly newspaper edited by Dunbar, as Orville put it, "...
for people of his race." The partnership lasted "...as long as our
financial resources permitted of it," Orville remarked, "which was not
very long."
Unlike Orville, Dunbar returned to Central High School and graduated
with the class of '91. Far from simply scrapping through, he wrote the
class song, edited the school newspaper, and served as president of both
the School Society and the Philomatheon literary club. If Dunbar hoped
that a sterling high school record might qualify the son of slaves for a
white-collar job that would enable him to exercise his literary gifts,
however, he was sadly mistaken. Earning four dollars a week as an
elevator operator at the Callahan building, he struggled to find outlets
for his poetry, and published his first book of verse, Oak and Ivy
(1892), at his own expense. Four years later he emerged as a national
literary celebrity on the basis of William Dean Howells extraordinarily
positive review of Dunbar's second book, Majors and Minors.
The poet left Dayton in 1896, the year of the great centennial,
determined to earn fame and fortune in the larger world. Over the next
decade he would produce ten volumes of poetry, four novels, four books
of short stories, five musical plays, and an assortment of essays and
articles for journals ranging from the Saturday Evening Post to Harper's
Weekly. Exhausted and suffering from alcoholism, he died of tuberculosis
in 1906 in the West Dayton home that he had purchased for his
mother.
There is no evidence that Dunbar ever saw Wilbur and Orville Wright
fly. At the time of his death, they were still regarded as somewhat
mysterious figures by their fellow Daytonians. When Dunbar had left town
in 1896, the Wrights were still neighborhood businessmen, running their
printing operation as well as a small scale bicycle sales, repair and
fabrication facility. By 1900 they had become "infected," as Wilbur
explained to one of their earliest correspondents, "with the belief that
flight is possible to man." Between 1899 and 1905, they produced a
series of six flying machines: one kite (1899), three gliders (1900,
1901, 1902), and three powered airplanes (1903, 1904, 1905). In six
short years, they had moved from a small kite that could be maneuvered
at will to the world's first practical airplane.
Incredibly, almost no one in Dayton, or anywhere else, fully
appreciated the magnitude of the Wright achievement. By the fall of
1905, the brothers were flying circles over a swampy pasture eight miles
east of Dayton, remaining in the air for up to forty minutes at a time,
and attracting almost no attention. They did not emerge as the first
great heroes of the new century until 1908, when they made their first
public flights from a race track near Le Mans, France, and from the
parade ground at Ft. Myer, Virginia. As in the case of Paul Dunbar,
Daytonians wanted to be certain what the rest of the world thought of
the Wright brothers before they were fully prepared to celebrate their
achievement.
Those turn-of-the-century optimists who had faith in the future of
the Gem City were right. The invention of the airplane represented a
major step in the transformation of Dayton. Over the next two decades,
Charles Kettering, Col. Edward Deeds, Arthur Morgan and others would
cement the image of Dayton as a place that encouraged new ideas and
technical innovation. By 1920, the typical American town of 1896 had
been transformed into a world center of innovation. Dayton was the town
where good ideas came from.
Ann Honious has produced the sort of genuinely useful study that one
should expect of a National Park Service historian. She provides a solid
examination of the development of an important and little known or
understood historic district, and insight into the unique impact of the
place on the people who lived and worked there. Ultimately, she helps us
to understand the extent to which these three friends reshaped the image
of their hometown, quite as much as they were shaped by it. She deserves
our thanks and our congratulations for helping us to better understand
Dayton, and the three extraordinary friends who called the place
home.
Tom D. Crouch
Senior Chief Curator
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
June 12, 1998
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