pour yourselves your favorite beverage, get yourselves some snacks, and settle in for a long set of three threads)
The Dayton region is distinguished from other metro areas in Ohio and the Midwest by the aviation history and the ongoing connection to the defense community via the large Air Force base here. The military presence and the connection with defense aerospace makes suburban Dayton more akin to similar communities on the West Coast and Sunbelt. Certainly there is a functional connection via the various command, control, and R&D activities associated with the base and its contractors.
As this month marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the oldest part of the Air Force base this will be a Memorial Day/anniversary tribute to Wright Patterson AFB, the “post town” of Fairborn, and also to Wright State, 40 years old as an independent university this year.
First, a look at the early 20th century & WWII development of the base and Fairborn (mostly about Fairborn), then an investigation on how the base influenced major civilian public works decisions, finishing up with a quick look at postwar Fairborn.
Starting at the beginning, with the Wright Brothers. After coming back from Kittyhawk the Wrights set up a flying field and later a flight school, and engaged in manufacturing at two locations in the city.
The flying field and catapult that launched the plane. One of the controversies regarding the Wrights is whether they satisfied all the requirements of powered flight, as their early plane did not become airborn under its own power. Santos-Dumont (who also developed early zeppelins) first accomplished that feat.
The ADA-compliant replica hangar (with exhibits inside).
Some early Wright factories. One they shared with an early auto-manufacturer, the other, is still standing and part of the Delphi-Inland plant in west Dayton.
(WSU library website has a whole gallery of the early manufacturing process in the Wright factory).
The Wrights did not succeed in manufacturing, and their design became obsolete, yet Dayton briefly became an early aviation center during WWI. Military aviation happened at the Wilbur Wright Field flying school and Fairfield aviation supply depot to the east, adjacent to the village of Fairfield, and research at the McCook Field near downtown. Aircraft manufacturing was at the Dayton-Wright plant south of town in Moraine City.
Some views of Wilbur Wright Field & the Fairfield Air Depot. The first building at FAD was designed by Albert Kahn of Ford Highland Park plant fame. This site was chosen for flying because it was very flat, being in the floodplain of the Mad River, and available, being controlled as a flood control retention basin behind Huffman Dam. Interestingly, the first freight rail service to the base was via interurban, the Ohio Electric. Steam road service was later substituted.
Dayton-Wright built a US version of a UK airplane. The plane was built in Dayton, but the engine came from Detroit.
Dayton-Wright had its own airfield, but a local industrialist (who would later be one of the founders of Pratt and Whitney) had an adjacent experimental airfield, where they tried to develop an early buzz bomb.
McCook Field and its tight site in Old North Dayton
McCook was much too close to downtown, with short take-off & landing areas and the possibilities of a fatal crash being more fatal than usual if it occurred over a heavily developed area
Dayton-Wright shut down after the war, so the empty plant and flying field was considered as a new location for McCook, or the research activity could move out-of-state to Virginia. Instead local industrialists got together and bought a site just to the east of Dayton, which became the new Wright Field
Some early Wright Field scenes. The base had rail service from the C&LE interurban line, and one of the gatehouses was configured as a waiting room for the trains.
The US had a very small military prior to WWII, but did a lot of experimentation with new military technology and tactics. At sea this meant trying out the aircraft carrier concept. In the air there was a lot of “rapid prototyping”, though the number of war birds in service was pretty small. Wright Field was part of the experimentation and testing process.
Some examples of how military aviation advanced in a short time, starting with an open-cockpit biplane bomber with a box frame fuselage, moving to monococque, single wing construction, to enclosed cockpits, to pressurized cabins (though this example is not a bomber), to the four-engine bomber (this plane is the prototype of the Flying Fortress, shown over Wright Field).
The story on this thread is really not with Wright Field but with the military airfield further east, and its relationship to the adjacent villages.
There were two to start, Fairfield and Osborn. Fairfield was the oldest, founded in the first decade of the 1800s, and one of the oldest towns in Greene County. Fairfield’s heyday was the coaching era. Osborn was founded as a market center on the Mad River Railroad, and grew as a rival to Fairfield. The original plat of Fairfield has some great antebellum houses, clustered around the intersection of the old turnpikes.
The base was located right next to this village.
With the coming of the Conservancy District and the relocation of the railroads away from the Huffman Dam flood control retention basin, the village of Osborn incorporated as a relocation company, which literally, physically, moved the entire town to a site just to the east of Fairfield, next to the relocated railroads.
This airfield dropped its training function after WWI and became one of four repair depots for the air corps. This was an industrial activity, where aircraft were flown in, taken to disassembly hangars, taken apart, the parts remanufactured in machine and component shops (or replaced), and then the planes reassembled and flown out to their duty stations. Another way to envision this is as a naval shipyard, but for aircraft.
Disassembly hangar
Machine shop for reworking parts
Eventually the flying field was renamed Patterson Field. The depot remained Fairfield Air Depot until depot maintenance ceased after WWII.
Fairfield and Osborn grew with this military industrial activity, essentially becoming industrial suburbs of Dayton. During the 1920s additional plats were added to the towns to accommodate the industrial workforce and military, and interurban service made commuting to Dayton easy.
World War IIDuring WWII Patterson and Wright fields boomed, and Fairfield and Osborn grew as well.
The WWII growth meant housing development both on and off base for troops, military families, and civilians. The housing was a mix of permanent housing projects, wooden temporary emergency housing, and jerry-building in vacant housing plats from the 1920s.
Also, highways were extended and improved from Dayton to the base to facilitate commuting. This era gave Dayton its first divided highway quasi-expressways, and saw the first proposal for a partial beltway around a portion of Dayton.
Taking a closer look at some of the housing and areas of growth in Fairfield, Osborn, and their surrounding plats, showing a mix of war worker housing and older styles.
In some ways we are seeing the premonitions of the type of development associated with postwar suburbia….
Fairfield, Osborn, and some vignettes from the two. Fairfield was the more honky-tonk place, Osborn more “established”.
Various other housing areas, on and off base
What’s interesting here is the missed chance with the interurban, which would have went right by these housing areas and the base. In WWII, interurbans that survived into that time became big parts of the war effort, which caused them to make enough money to survive into the later 40s. Two lines that served military bases were the North Shore (Great Lakes Training Center) and the Bamberger Railroad (Ogden Air Depot)
During the war the area was served by bus service by the successor to the interurban line. The service terminated at the old interurban station site in Dayton (this bus station survives as a bar at Patterson and Third )
One of the large housing areas was Skyway, which had family housing and dorm housing for single civilian women, in close proximity across Route 4 to the military “Sherwood Forest” barracks. The jingle was “If you’re nervous/in the service/head across the highway/to Skyway”
Skyway also had a small shopping and community center, plus what looks like a bus stop on the US 4 expressway, and a sidewalk across the street to the supply and logistics complex….back then people must’ve walked more.
Wright and Patterson fields merged in 1948 into Wright-Patterson AFB. The spirit of merger was in the air as in 1949-50 Fairfield and Osborn merged into Fairborn.
Apparently the Wright View area received a lot of in-migrants from Appalachia looking for war work, and was dubbed “Little Kentucky”. It was identified as a blighted area in a postwar military planning study. The area was incorporated, but voted to surrender its charter in 1948. Eventually this community was annexed into Fairborn.
Poor conditions were not confined to Wright-View; the wartime housing shortage led to substandard housing problems throughout the region.
In the late 1940s the military proposed a large land acquisition for a housing area and other military community uses (including a hospital and an “Air Force Institute of Technology”) for a large tract of land between the two bases as a solution. The planning concept introduced postwar modern architecture and housing styles.
The military already owned pieces of this (called “Area D”), but never did acquire the entire property.
This notional “Area D” will be a player the second part of the story.
