Dayton
Discover Dayton
A concise introduction to Dayton, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Dayton’s claim is aviation. Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop here, worked out powered flight in it, and came back to Dayton to do the real development flying at Huffman Prairie outside town — the first practical aeroplane was refined in an Ohio cow pasture rather than at Kitty Hawk. The Dayton Aviation Heritage national historical park covers the shop, the printing office they ran with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the field.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force, at Wright-Patterson air base, is the largest military aviation museum in the world: four hangars holding several hundred aircraft, including presidential planes you can walk through, and free to enter. For anyone with any interest in aircraft it justifies the trip on its own.
The city itself sits where four rivers meet, which caused a catastrophic flood in 1913 and produced, in response, one of the first flood-control districts in the United States; the levees and dry dams are still the reason downtown is dry. The Oregon District is the historic block of bars and small restaurants, the Dayton Art Institute sits above the river, and the surrounding countryside holds a run of prehistoric earthworks. Dayton is also where the Bosnian community settled in unusual numbers after the 1990s.