Dayton, Ohio, was once the most inventive city in America, issuing more patents per capita than any other city in 1900, including Boston, Chicago, and New York. The city's unique geographic location at the confluence of five rivers, combined with the 1829 Miami and Erie Canal, created an industrial hub that birthed revolutionary inventions including the airplane (Wright brothers), the electric self-starter (Kettering), the first mechanical cash register (Ritty), and the first guided missile (Kettering Bug). However, this industrial dominance began to decline in the 1970s when electronic technology replaced mechanical innovations, leading to the departure of major companies like NCR and the closure of key manufacturing plants. By 2010, Dayton's population had fallen back to approximately 141,527, nearly matching its 1900 population, demonstrating how technological change and economic shifts can dramatically alter a city's fortunes.
The Rise and Fall of America's Most Inventive City Dayton, OhioAdded:
In 1900, Dayton, Ohio, was issued more patents per capita than any other city in the United States. More than Boston.
More than Chicago. More than New York. A city of 85,000 people on a flat plain in southwestern Ohio was, by the most rigorous measure of American ingenuity, the most inventive place on Earth.
The list of things invented or first manufactured there reads like a syllabus of the 20th century. The airplane.
The electric self-starter that ended the hand crank and changed what an automobile could be.
The first mechanical cash register.
Freon. Leaded gasoline. The pop-top can.
The Kettering Bug, which was the first guided missile.
The bomb machines that broke the German Enigma cipher in 1943 were built in a factory three blocks from the Miami River.
Today, Dayton's population is 137,000, less than half of what it was at its peak in 1960.
The factory that built 6 million Chevrolet pickups stands empty under another company's name.
The cash register plant has been demolished.
The bicycle shop where the Wright brothers built the first airplane sits inside a national park alongside a parking lot. The distance between those two facts is one of the great compressed stories of American capitalism. And it begins, as so much of 19th century America began, at the place where rivers meet.
Chapter 1.
The confluence.
Dayton was founded in 1796 at a point on the map that almost guaranteed a city.
The Great Miami River, flowing south toward the Ohio, meets the Mad River there.
The Stillwater River meets it there.
Wolf Creek empties into the Great Miami at the same basin.
Five waterways converged in a single low-lying flood plain, which meant water power, drinking water, transportation, and in the spring, catastrophic flooding.
The first three were the gift. The fourth was the debt.
For 30 years, the town was a farming village of a few thousand people, slow to grow because the rivers, while abundant, ran the wrong direction for commerce.
Goods coming out of Dayton had to flow down the Great Miami to the Ohio River, and then to the Mississippi, and then to New Orleans.
There was no economical way to ship east.
That changed in 1829 when the Miami and Erie Canal opened through downtown Dayton, connecting the Ohio River to Lake Erie through a ditch dug 400 miles across Western Ohio.
Not a metaphorical ditch, an actual ditch, 40 ft wide and 4 ft deep, dug by Irish and German immigrant labor for 30 cents a day. The canal turned Dayton into a shipping town, and more importantly, into a machine shop town.
Boats needed locks, locks needed gears, gears needed precision.
By the 1840s, the foundries and machine shops along the canal had earned a regional reputation for fine metal work, the kind of work that requires a tolerance measured in fractions of an inch.
This was the seed of everything that came after.
A city of mechanics had been created almost by accident by the demands of moving coal and pork by water.
In 1845, a writer for the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle traveled north on the canal and filed a dispatch describing Dayton as the gem of all our interior towns.
The nickname stuck.
The Gem City had a population of 6,000 in 1840. By 1870, it had 38,000.
By 1890, it had 61,000.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
To understand what Dayton became, you have to meet the men who walked into its machine shops in the 1880s.
Chapter two.
The inventor class.
Enter James Ritty.
Ritty was a Dayton saloon keeper, a man with no formal engineering training, whose primary occupation was selling whiskey at a tavern on Main Street called the Pony House.
His secondary occupation was watching his bartenders steal from him.
In 1878, during a steamboat trip to Europe, Ritty observed a device that counted the revolutions of the ship's propeller.
And the idea fixed itself in his mind that a similar mechanism could count something else.
He returned to Dayton and, working with his brother John, patented what he called Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier in November of 1879.
The first cash register in history was a wooden box with mechanical keys that rang a bell when a sale was made, ensuring that every transaction was witnessed by a sound the owner could hear from the back room. Ritty had no interest in running a manufacturing business. He sold the patent in 1881 to a man named Jacob Eckert for a thousand dollars. And Eckert formed a small company called the National Manufacturing Company on Main Street with a workforce of fewer than 20 men.
Three years later, in 1884, a coal salesman named John Henry Patterson bought National Manufacturing for $6,500.
His friends told him he had paid too much.
There There a brief period when Patterson tried to undo the deal and was refused. Patterson renamed the company the National Cash Register Company. He moved it in 1888 to a new factory complex on South Main Street on a sloping tract that became known as the Patterson farm and within 5 years he had turned a small foundry into an industrial cathedral.
In 1893, NCR built the world's first daylight factory.
A building with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on every elevation. Designed so that the workers inside would never need artificial light during the day.
This was at a time when American industrial labor was still mostly performed in the sweatshop. In basements, in tenements, by candle.
Patterson built a factory you could see into from the street.
The list of things Patterson did first reads like a manifesto.
He opened the world's first formal sales training school at NCR in 1893.
He wrote a 16-page sales script that became the foundation of modern American selling.
He installed showers in the factory, hot lunches in the cafeteria, a library, a school for the children of employees, and gardens between the buildings. He paid for the men in his sales force to attend an annual convention in Dayton called the 100 Point Club.
None of this was philanthropy in the way the word is used now. Patterson believed with the cold conviction of a salesman that a worker who washed before lunch sold more cash registers in the afternoon.
By 1914, NCR was producing 110,000 cash registers a year and exporting them to every continent on Earth.
By 1930, an estimated one in six of all American corporate executives had at some point trained at NCR or under one of Patterson's lieutenants.
The most famous of those lieutenants was a young Ohio salesman named Thomas Watson, whom Patterson had hired in 1899, and whom Patterson would later fire in 1913.
Watson moved to New York, took over a small company that made tabulating machines, and renamed it International Business Machines.
Patterson lost an empire he had built, and seeded an empire he had not.
Now, consider what was happening four blocks away from the NCR factory in those same years.
In 1892, two brothers in their 20s opened a small repair shop at 1005 West 3rd Street, in a working-class neighborhood on the west side of the Great Miami.
Their names were Wilbur and Orville Wright.
They were the sons of a bishop in the United Brethren Church. Neither of them had finished high school, and their previous business had been a small newspaper called the West Side News.
The bicycle was, in 1892, the new technology of the moment. Lightweight steel frames, pneumatic tires, the safety bicycle replacing the high-wheeler.
12 million Americans owned one by the middle of the decade.
The Wrights rented frames in their shop, then sold them, then in 1896 began manufacturing their own, called the Van Cleve, named for an ancestor who had been one of Dayton's founding settlers.
The bicycle, more than any other invention of the late 19th century, taught a generation of men to think about lightness, balance, and the conversion of human energy into forward motion.
The bicycle made the airplane possible.
The Wrights, working on bicycles by day, began in 1899 to read everything that had been published about powered flight.
They wrote to the Smithsonian for a bibliography.
They studied Otto Lilienthal's glider experiments.
They studied Octave Chanute and George Cayley and the work of Samuel Langley.
And they came to the conclusion, which no one else had reached, that the published aerodynamic data was wrong.
In the summer of 1901, the brothers built a wind tunnel in the back of their bicycle shop. It was 6 ft long, 16 in square in cross-section, and powered by a 1 horsepower gas engine that drove a fan.
Inside it, they tested more than 200 wing shapes, recording lift and drag for each.
They rebuilt the published equations of aviation from scratch.
Their shop mechanic, a quiet Dayton machinist named Charlie Taylor, built them a 12 horsepower aluminum block gasoline engine that weighed 152 lb and could push four propellers through still air. On December 17th, 1903, on a sand spit on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk, Orville Wright lay flat on the lower wing of a contraption built in a Dayton bicycle shop and flew it for 12 seconds, a distance of 120 ft.
The first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight in human history was an object built in a city of machine shops by two men who repaired bicycles for a living.
They returned to Dayton, and for the next 2 years, they perfected the machine at Huffman Prairie, a flat cow pasture 8 mi east of town, owned by a Dayton banker named Torrence Huffman, who let them use it for free in exchange for an agreement that they would not damage his cows.
On October 5th, 1905, Wilbur Wright flew the Wright Flyer III in a continuous loop over Huffman Prairie for 39 minutes and 23 miles.
It was the first practical airplane.
What the Wrights did next is less well remembered than what they did at Kitty Hawk, but it is the part that placed Dayton on the map of the world.
In 1908, Wilbur sailed to France with a crated aircraft and flew demonstrations at Le Mans before crowds that grew over 6 weeks from a few hundred curious aristocrats to 50,000 spectators on a single Sunday.
The European aviation community, which had been skeptical of the American claims, was forced into the open admission that two bicycle mechanics from Ohio had solved a problem that Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley and Otto Lilienthal had not.
Wilbur was awarded the Legion d'honneur.
Orville flew demonstrations for the United States Army at Fort Myer, Virginia that same year.
By 1909, the Wright Company was incorporated and a manufacturing plant was built in Dayton on West 3rd Street to produce airplanes.
The first commercial aviation factory in America stood five blocks from the bicycle shop.
Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever in Dayton on May 30th, 1912 at the age of 45.
He had been the architect of the airplane in a way his more famous brother was not.
Wilbur was the calculator, the theorist, the one who had rebuilt the equations of lift and drag from scratch in the wind tunnel.
Orville sold the Wright Company in 1915 and retired from manufacturing. He never married.
He lived for another 33 years in Dayton, mostly at Hawthorne Hill, the mansion he built for the family in 1914, where he worked in a small laboratory on inventions he no longer patented.
He died in 1948.
Picture downtown Dayton on a Tuesday afternoon in 1906. The NCR factory on South Main is producing 300 cash registers a day. Glowing through its glass walls, hot lunches at noon for 9,000 workers.
The Wright brothers are flying a powered aircraft 8 miles east of the courthouse.
A coal merchant on 4th Street named Edward Deeds is sitting in his office at NCR, where he serves as Patterson's vice president, sketching out a plan he has been discussing with a 28-year-old NCR engineer named Charles Kettering.
The plan involves a barn behind Deeds' house on Central Avenue and an electric ignition system for an automobile and a small group of NCR men who have agreed to work nights and weekends without pay.
Three blocks south, on the Great Miami River, the Miami and Erie Canal is still moving traffic, although less than it used to.
Within Dayton in this single year are the engineering staff that will go on to invent the electric starter, build the first guided missile, manufacture the airplane for World War I, found Frigidaire, found Delco, hold a combined 2,000 patents, and seed both General Motors research and IBM.
The city's population is 95,000.
Now, the barn behind Deeds' house.
Charles Kettering had arrived at NCR in 1904, a year out of Ohio State, where he had studied electrical engineering after a stint as a country school teacher.
He was nearsighted, plainspoken, and obsessed with mechanism.
In 1906, he developed the first electric cash register, which replaced the hand crank that had been NCR's signature feature for 27 years.
Edward Deeds, then in his early 40s, was an Indiana farm boy who had risen at NCR by being competent in a way Patterson trusted.
The two men began to meet in the evenings in the loft of Deeds's barn at 319 Central Avenue.
They were joined by other NCR engineers, William Chryst, Harold Talbott, Henry Theobald, who came after their shift and worked under hanging electric bulbs until midnight. They called themselves the Barn Gang. They borrowed tools from the NCR shop in defiance of company policy. They were trying to invent a way to start an automobile without a hand crank.
The hand crank was, in 1909, the great obstacle to mass automobile adoption. It required physical strength and considerable nerve.
A backfire could break a wrist or, in the famous case that drove Henry Leland of Cadillac to commission the work, kill a man.
Leland's friend Byron Carter had cranked a stalled car for a stranded woman in 1908.
The engine kicked back. The crank caught him in the jaw, and he died of complications from the infection.
Leland approached Kettering and Deeds and ordered 8,000 ignition sets. He needed a way to start a Cadillac with a button.
Kettering's solution was elegant and counterintuitive.
He used a small electric motor that drew enough current to crank the engine for a few seconds.
Far more current than any motor of that size was supposed to handle, but only briefly, so the windings would not burn out. The math was straightforward.
The motor would do the work of a man's arm for 2 seconds, and then a battery, recharged by a generator that the same device doubled as, would carry the load.
He filed the patent in 1911.
In 1912, the Cadillac Model 30 became the first production automobile in the world with an electric starter.
Within 5 years, the hand crank was obsolete.
Women began to drive in large numbers for the first time.
The automobile, in the form we still recognize, was completed in a Dayton barn.
Kettering and Deeds had incorporated their work in 1909 as the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, which everyone then and now calls Delco.
They sold Delco in 1916 to United Motors for cash and stock worth $9 million.
United Motors was absorbed shortly afterward into General Motors, and Delco became the foundation of the General Motors Research Corporation with Kettering as its head.
He held the position for 27 years. He would in that time develop Freon refrigerant, leaded gasoline, Duco lacquer paint for cars, the first practical diesel locomotive engine, and 186 separate United States patents.
Remember the Wright brothers. Remember NCR. Remember the barn. They will all come back to one address. Chapter 3.
The city at flood stage.
For 3 days in late March of 1913, it rained on the watershed of the Great Miami River as it had not rained in living memory.
Between 8 and 11 inches of rain fell on the saturated ground of central Ohio into rivers already swollen from a snowy winter.
Easter Sunday, March 23rd, was warm and gray. By Tuesday, the water in downtown Dayton was rising at nearly 2 feet an hour.
The Great Miami River crested at 29 feet on Wednesday, March 26th.
The levees built around the downtown failed in a sequence of breaches and the water came into the central business district in a wave.
Some streets stood under 20 ft of water for days. Gas mains sheared off at the foundations of flooded buildings exploded into the floodwater and ignited a series of fires that burned for 36 hours across 2 square miles of downtown fed by the wooden interiors of buildings whose lower floors were submerged.
360 people died in Dayton.
65,000 were displaced. 20,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The total cost was estimated at $100 million in the currency of 1913 which is roughly $3 billion today.
The flood remains the worst natural disaster in Ohio history and was in its time second only to the Galveston hurricane of 1900 in American casualties.
John Henry Patterson, who was then 68 years old and had recently been convicted in federal court of antitrust violations and sentenced to a year in prison did something that revised his place in Dayton's memory.
He converted the NCR factory into a relief headquarters within hours.
The carpentry shop began producing flat-bottomed wooden rescue boats 300 of them built in 2 days, each capable of carrying eight people that were used by NCR employees and volunteer crews to pull more than 10,000 people off the roofs of submerged houses.
The factory cafeteria served 2,750 meals a day to refugees.
Patterson lent the company printing press to the Dayton Daily News whose own presses were underwater so that the city would have a newspaper.
He raised by personal subscription more than $2 million for rebuilding.
His federal sentence was commuted by President Wilson the following year, partly in recognition of what he had done.
Out of the flood came a piece of American engineering history that has been forgotten because it has worked too well.
In 1914, the Ohio legislature created the Miami Conservancy District, the first major regional flood control district in the United States with the power to tax property and condemn land.
The district hired an engineer named Arthur Morgan, who designed a system of five massive earthen dams upriver of Dayton at Englewood, Lockington, Taylorsville, Huffman, and Germantown and excavated channel improvements through the city.
The dams were finished in 1922.
Downtown Dayton has not flooded since.
Morgan went on to become the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
By 1917, with the dams under construction and the country at war, Dayton's industrialists made a collective bet on a single industry.
Deeds, Kettering, Orville Wright, and a young promoter named Harold Talbott incorporated the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company that summer and built a plant at Moraine on the south edge of the city.
The plant manufactured more than 3,000 de Havilland DH-4 bombers during the 18 months of American involvement in World War I, the only American-built aircraft to see combat.
In the same period, Kettering developed at Dayton-Wright something called the Liberty Eagle, more commonly known as the Kettering Bug, an unmanned biplane carrying 180 lb of explosive that flew on a preset gyroscope to a calculated target and dropped its wings on command.
It was the first guided aerial missile in history. The war ended before it saw combat.
In October 1917, the United States Army opened McCook Field on the north side of Dayton as its primary aviation engineering center.
By 1924, when McCook had outgrown its site, the citizens of Dayton raised $425,000 in 2 days, by some accounts, in less than 30 hours, to purchase 4,520 acres of farmland northeast of the city and deeded it to the federal government.
The new installation was named Wright Field in honor of the brothers.
It merged in 1948 with the adjacent Patterson Field, named for one of John Henry Patterson's nephews who had died in a 1923 airplane accident, to form Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Wright-Patterson is today the largest single-site employer in Ohio with 25,000 jobs.
By 1929, General Motors had acquired Dayton-Wright and converted the Moraine plant to refrigerator manufacturing.
The Frigidaire division, which had been founded [clears throat] in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and acquired by GM in 1919, moved its main production to Dayton in 1921 and expanded into the converted Dayton-Wright facility through the late 1920s.
By 1937, Frigidaire was the largest household appliance manufacturer in the world.
The word Frigidaire entered American English as a generic term for refrigerator, in the way that Kleenex and Xerox would in later decades.
The company employed 9,000 workers at Moraine alone.
By 1940, Dayton had become known among GM executives as Little Detroit.
It contained the largest concentration of General Motors workers outside the state of Michigan.
Delco Products on East First Street, Delco Moraine on the south side, Frigidaire at the Moraine plant, Delco Radio at the Inland building on Leo Street, and Inland Manufacturing across the river.
25,000 GM jobs in a city of 200,000 people.
The neighborhoods that surrounded the plants, Old North Dayton, McCook Field, Edgemont, Walnut Hills, were grids of two-story frame houses built by carpenters who worked at the same factories the houses were built for. Consider what Dayton was producing in 1943.
NCR's South Main Street factory, under contract so secret that even the workers did not know what they were building, was manufacturing the Bombe machines.
6-ft tall electromechanical computers designed by Alan Turing and refined for production by an NCR engineer named Joseph Desch.
Building 26 on the NCR campus, a windowless concrete structure built in 1942 with a perimeter of armed Marines, produced 121 Bombe by the end of the war.
They were shipped under heavy guard to a Navy installation in Washington, D.C.
where they ran around the clock breaking the German naval Enigma cipher.
Historians credit the Bombe with shortening the Battle of the Atlantic by as much as a year, which is to say with saving an unknown number of merchant lives that ran into the tens of thousands.
The workers who built them were sworn to a secrecy that most of them carried to their graves.
Three blocks away on East First Street, Delco was producing 1.5 million 50-calibre machine gun rounds a day.
At Moraine, Frigidaire had been converted to manufacture the propellers for the B-29 Superfortress, including the propellers on the two aircraft Enola Gay and Bockscar that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At Dayton-Wright's old Moraine plant, 12,000 workers were building parts for the Manhattan Project's K-25 gaseous diffusion facility, though they did not know that either.
The end of the war did not slow Dayton, it [clears throat] accelerated it.
The veterans came home to a city whose factories converted in months from ordinance to refrigerators, from propellers to washing machines.
Frigidaire alone hired 3,000 workers in 1946.
NCR added 5,000.
The GI Bill paid for the suburban subdivisions that began to ring the city.
Belmont, Kettering, Centerville, Beavercreek.
The Dayton public schools were the third largest school district in Ohio.
The Dayton Daily News had a Sunday circulation of 260,000 in a metropolitan area of 450,000, which is to say that more than half the households in greater Dayton took the newspaper.
Picture South Main Street on a Friday evening in 1948.
The NCR factory, now 10 city blocks long, glows from the inside out along its full elevation. Its daylight windows reversing into nightlight windows after the 4:30 whistle.
20,000 men and women are walking out the gates to street cars, to buses, to their own cars.
Five blocks north, the Engineers Club on East Monument Avenue, founded by Deeds and Kettering in 1914, a Beaux-Arts building of buff brick and limestone, is hosting its weekly dinner for the men who have made Dayton what it is.
The Loew's Theater on Main Street is showing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The Dayton Daily News, in the building Patterson rebuilt for them after the flood, is going to press for the Saturday edition.
A streetcar runs north on Main, past the Reibold building and the Mendelson building, past Rike's Department Store, past the Arcade on Third Street with its glass-domed rotunda.
The Arcade was finished in 1904 and was, for a generation, the finest covered shopping arcade between New York and Chicago.
The Victory Theater is showing a touring production of South Pacific.
The Biltmore Hotel on First Street has every room taken.
The population of the city is 243,000.
The population of the metropolitan area is approaching half a million.
In this single year, the Dayton Public Library will record more circulations per capita than any other city library in America.
By 1960, the city recorded its all-time peak population of 262,332.
There were six Fortune 500 companies headquartered within the city limits: NCR, Mead Paper, Standard Register, Reynolds and Reynolds, Huffy, and Dayco.
The Dayton area had between 70,000 union manufacturing jobs.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which had absorbed the entire United States Air Force Research and Development apparatus in 1951, employed another 30,000.
NCR alone, by 1969, had 20,000 workers in Dayton, the highest single-site employee count in the company's history.
The median family income in the metropolitan area in 1969 was higher than that of New York City, higher than Chicago, higher than Los Angeles.
A General Motors line worker at Moraine with 20 years of service and overtime was earning the equivalent of $70,000 in present-day money with a pension, a health plan, and a house in Kettering or Belmont that he owned outright.
And then very quietly things began to shift.
Chapter 4 The Machine Age Ends The cash register was a mechanical device for 90 years. From Ritty's wooden box in 1879 through the 1960s, every NCR machine was built around precision gears, springs, levers, and rotating drums.
The Patterson farm in Dayton existed because the cash register was a machine that required, in its fabrication, thousands of small metal parts, each tool to fractions of an inch.
The factory and the city were a single industrial organism, perfectly matched to a particular kind of object.
In the early 1970s, that object disappeared.
The electronic cash register.
Silicon transistors, integrated circuits, no moving parts, was developed by NCR's competitors in California and Japan, and within 5 years it had taken almost the entire market.
NCR's mechanical division, the engine that had built Dayton, became a museum exhibit while it was still operating.
The company tried to pivot. It built a $60 million electronics facility on the South Main campus in 1974.
It was too late.
NCR posted a $60 million loss in 1972.
It posted a six-fold larger loss in 1976.
A new CEO, William Anderson, brought in from outside Dayton, made the decision in 1974 that the company's future was no longer in Ohio.
In 1977, NCR announced that it was moving the bulk of its cash register production out of Dayton.
The South Main facility, which had employed 20,000 workers in 1969, was reduced to 5,000 by 1980 and to 2,500 by 1985.
Demolition of the historic factory complex began in 1978.
The Daylight Factory of 1893, the building that had introduced glass windows to American industry, was demolished in sections through the late 1980s.
The bricks were sold. The site was cleared.
By 1990, only a few of the original buildings remained and most of those would come down within the next decade.
The Frigidaire collapse came in parallel and on the same timetable.
The Moraine plant, which had employed 9,000 workers in 1955, had been on a slow contraction through the 1960s as competition from Whirlpool and General Electric squeezed margins.
By 1975, the workforce was down to 4,000.
General Motors sold the Frigidaire brand in March of 1979 to White Consolidated Industries, which closed the Moraine refrigerator operation within 12 months.
The buildings were emptied. The tooling was sold for scrap.
2,900 Frigidaire workers were terminated in a single quarter.
The Moraine buildings were retooled in 1981 to build Chevrolet S10 pickup trucks and for the next 27 years, the Moraine assembly plant produced 6 million vehicles. At peak in the late 1990s, it employed 6,000 workers building S-10s, S-15s, GMC Jimmys, Chevrolet Blazers, and Trailblazers.
It was the largest single industrial workforce remaining in Dayton.
And through the 1990s, it was widely considered the most efficient assembly plant in the General Motors system, regularly winning internal awards for quality and throughput. Other things kept closing.
Delco Products on East First Street, the spiritual successor to the original 1909 Delco company, closed in 1998 after 89 years.
Delco Moraine, which had built brake systems for half a century, closed in 2002.
Inland Manufacturing closed in 2008.
Mead Paper, which had been headquartered in Dayton since 1881, merged with Westvaco in 2002 and moved its headquarters to Connecticut. Standard Register, the Dayton-based business forms company, went bankrupt in 2015.
Huffy Corporation, the bicycle manufacturer that had inherited the city's bicycle-making tradition from the Wright brothers, moved its bicycle production to China in the late 1990s and went through bankruptcy reorganization in 2004.
Six Fortune 500 companies in 1960, all of them headquartered within the city limits.
By 2010, none of them were left.
Between 1970 and 1990, the manufacturing base of the Dayton metropolitan area lost approximately 30,000 jobs. The city's population fell from 262,000 in 1960 to 243,000 in 1970, to 203,000 in 1980 to 182,000 in 1990 to 166,000 in 2000.
The Arcade on Third Street closed in 1991.
The Rike's department store on Main, which had been the largest retailer in Southwestern Ohio, closed in 1992.
The Loew's theater had closed in 1975.
The Biltmore Hotel had closed in 1981.
The streetcars had stopped running in 1947, replaced by buses that themselves ran on shrinking routes through the '70s and '80s as ridership collapsed.
On the morning of June 3rd, 2008, with gasoline at $4 a gallon and the American sport utility vehicle market collapsing, General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner announced that the Moraine Assembly plant would close.
The plant had won the J.D. Power Gold Award for vehicle quality the year before. It was, by every internal measure, one of the better operations in the GM system. It was closed anyway.
The last vehicle off the line was a white GMC Envoy, completed on December 23rd, 2008.
1,100 workers, the survivors of an industrial workforce that had once been 6,000, lost their jobs that day.
Six months later, on June 2nd, 2009, NCR Corporation announced that it was moving its corporate headquarters from Dayton to Duluth, Georgia.
The company had been in Dayton for 125 years.
Its local workforce, which had stood at 1,300 the year before, was reduced to fewer than 100 within 12 months.
NCR's departure was widely understood to be the end of something larger than a corporate relocation.
Between 2001 and 2007, the Dayton metropolitan area had already lost an estimated 23,000 manufacturing jobs.
The NCR move closed the ledger. The 2010 census recorded 141,527 people in the city of Dayton.
Almost exactly the number who had lived there in 1900. A century of growth had been reversed in 50 years.
Chapter 5 The inventory of what remains.
Walk west from downtown Dayton on 3rd Street across the bridge over the Great Miami River into the neighborhood the Wright brothers lived in for almost their entire working lives.
The bicycle shop at 1127 West 3rd Street is gone. Moved in 1937 by Henry Ford to his Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan where it stands today as a foreign object 200 miles from its origin.
The shop at 22 South Williams Street survives. Owned by the National Park Service, the second to last of the seven shops the brothers used and the only one still on its original site.
Inside the brick walls are original.
The wooden floor is original.
The wind tunnel was not preserved. At Hawthorne Hill in the suburb of Oakwood, the mansion Orville Wright built for himself and his sister Katherine in 1914 still stands on its hill of grass.
Orville lived there until his death in 1948.
The house is owned and operated as a museum by Dayton History.
The NCR campus on South Main Street is mostly gone.
The University of Dayton acquired most of the former Patterson farm in 2005 and built dormitories, classrooms, and parking lots on the foundations of buildings that once employed 20,000 people.
A single early NCR structure remains, repurposed as university offices.
A small bronze plaque marks the location of the Daylight Factory.
The Engineers Club at 110 East Monument Avenue, founded by Deeds and Kettering in 1914 with the slogan that there was no problem so great it could not be solved by the application of intelligence, in medio stat virtus, still operates from its original building.
Membership is by invitation. The dining room serves lunch on weekdays. At Carillon Historical Park on the south side of the city, in a series of buildings collected on the grounds of the 151-foot bell tower commissioned by Kettering's wife in 1942, the surviving physical artifacts of Dayton's industrial century have been brought together under one roof.
The original 1905 Wright Flyer III, the first practical airplane, sits at the center of the park's main hall, having been restored under Orville Wright's personal supervision before his death.
A 1906 electrified NCR cash register, one of Kettering's first inventions, sits in a glass case.
The first Chevrolet S10 built at the Moraine Assembly Plant in 1981 is parked next to the last GMC Envoy off the line in 2008.
The two vehicles face each other across a strip of polished concrete separated by 27 years of work and 6 million units of production.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, on the northeast side of the city, remains the region's largest employer.
The base is home to the Air Force Research Laboratory and to a $4 billion federal research enterprise.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force, on the base's southern boundary, contains the largest collection of military aircraft in the world.
In 2014, the Fuyao Group, a Chinese automotive glass manufacturer based in Fuqing, purchased the former Moraine Assembly Plant, the building where 6 million Chevrolet pickups had been built.
Fu Yao Glass America began producing windshields and side glass there in 2015.
It employs approximately 2,000 workers, the largest single industrial workforce in Dayton today.
The wages are lower than those that were paid at GM. The jobs are non-union.
The plant operates at high efficiency by the standards of the global automotive supply chain.
It was the subject of an American documentary film in 2019 that won an Academy Award.
In May of that same year, on the night of Memorial Day, 16 tornadoes touched down in the Dayton metropolitan area in a single storm system.
The storms damaged 4,000 structures.
Three months later, on the morning of August 4th, 2019, a gunman in body armor opened fire in the Oregon District, a historic entertainment quarter five blocks east of the river.
Nine people were killed in 32 seconds before Dayton police shot the attacker.
The dead included the gunman's sister.
The Great Miami River still runs through downtown Dayton unflooded, regulated by the five earthen dams Arthur Morgan designed in 1914 after seeing what unregulated water had done to the city.
The dams have held for more than 100 years.
They were built to handle a flood 40% larger than the one in 1913, and they have never been tested at capacity.
The water moves through downtown quietly between concrete banks, past parking lots that used to be factories.
At Huffman Prairie, 8 miles east of the city, the field where Wilbur Wright flew the first practical airplane in 1905, is preserved as part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.
The land is owned by the United States Air Force and is closed most days of the year because it sits inside the perimeter of Wright-Patterson.
On the days it is open, you can walk to a wooden replica of the launching catapult the brothers used and stand where the airplane lifted into the air for the first time in human history.
The grass is mowed.
The sky overhead is the same sky.
From certain angles on certain afternoons, the Carillon at Carillon Park is visible above the trees from the highway.
151 ft of stone striking the quarter hour over a museum of objects that built a city and outlasted it.
The Wright Flyer is in there.
The first Chevy S10 is in there.
The last GMC Envoy is in there.
A cash register that was made in 1906 is in there.
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