Dispatches From the Parks: Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
The park that I was most surprised by on my visit to Ohio last week was Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. It's quite a name for a park for sure, but I think it’s trying to convey how much history this park tries to preserve. The park was established in 1992 in order to preserve Dayton’s history, especially in regards to the Wright brothers and Paul Laurence Dunbar (a poet who briefly worked with the Wright brothers on a newspaper). If you have never been, Dayton feels like a suburb of the much more frenetic Cincinnati even though it's a city itself.
Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park is composed of six districts. One district (the Huffman Prairie Flying Field) is on an active air force base so access is limited in the winter months. The main district is the Wright Cycle Company, which preserves the building where one of the Wright brothers’ many businesses was run as well as contains the park’s main visitor center and museum. It was this district that I visited. From the parking lot, it’s an interesting walk to the visitor center and museum as there are multiple wall and sidewalk murals on display as well as multiple wayside exhibits outside of the Wright Cycle Company (which is right across the sidewalk from the visitor center and museum).
The museum definitely looks new and is quite sprawling as it takes up two floors and multiple rooms. Most of these rooms have working interactive exhibits (which I think I have mentioned before is rare in the National Park Service). My favorite of these was one that had you start up one of the propeller systems that the Wright brothers used for their planes. The museum does a great job of telling the stories of the many famous people that have inhabited Dayton, and it does not at all give the short shrift to Paul Laurence Dunbar, who has his own room of exhibits as well as his own theater. Everything about this museum was so detailed. An example of how in-depth this museum goes is that they built a full scale general store that was contemporary to when the Wright brothers lived in Dayton in the middle of the museum in order to give you a firsthand feeling of what it was like to live when they did.
It’s interesting to view this park through the lens of being a companion park to the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where the Wright brothers made their famous flights. That park too had a well maintained and eye-catching visitor center, although that one was much older having been built in the 1960s. It was also notable how much of the firsthand artifacts from the flights were at this park rather than the one at Kitty Hawk. For instance, the Dayton museum had parts of the Wright brothers’ tent as well as pieces of the engine from their famous plane. Making this park feeling more intune with the Wright brothers was that the museum was built around the Wright brothers’ printing shop. It just goes to show how innovative they were as they ran multiple businesses and invented quite a few things (which the exhibits do a great job of stressing). It’s that type of in depth detail that really makes you connect to these people. I, for one, was floored when I slowly came to realize as I walked through the museum that Orville Wright lived through so many advancements in aviation that he sat on the board for NASA’s predecessor.
The museum at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park is so large that it also currently houses the Charles Young Buffalo Soldier National Monument visitor center in its conference room as that park goes under renovation. The exhibits for that part were very basic, but it still just goes to show how expansive this building is. I spent an entire morning here so if you want to check out any other districts of the park you will be spending a good day here.
