Dayton Aviation Heritage Trail

Dayton, Ohio is the birthplace of aviation. 

They even have an "Aviation Trail" of 15 locations you can visit and each one has a significant contribution to flight.

We started at the national park service visitor center.

They start with a timeline of the Wright brothers and other contributions leading up to Kitty Hawk. (When we were at that site in North Carolina we heard a little about what lead up to the moment when the first flight took place, but this definitely expanded on what we'd learned!)

Right outside the visitor center is an original Wright brothers cycle shop. This was their 4th shop, but it still stands in its original location made of the original materials - a building where Wilbur and Orville experimented and invented. So fun!

A contemporary of the brothers was an African American poet/author named Paul Dunbar. He was the first African American to make a living solely off his writing and we just learned in Little Rock that the high school for the colored students (some of whom ultimately became the Little Rock Nine) was named after him.

Well, the library at Wright State University is also named after him. And in that library, they have a ton of original historic documents about all the aviation happenings from Dayton's history. The librarian enjoyed telling us all about their collections available online and showing us much memorabilia that the Wright family continues to donate - like the gold medals in this case. They are originals, while the Smithsonian in DC has replicas.

Our next stop was the field where the Wright brothers picked up their testing after their initial successes in North Carolina. The visitor center here picks up the flight story after Kitty Hawk and takes us through their successful controlled flights and attempts to share their invention with various governments. 

Next, we visited the Air Force's National Museum. We thought the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, FL was incredible and this one is of equal quality!

It was so great, it got its own post (see next).

After the museum, we finished up our exploration of aviation with a visit to the Wright family gravesite and then headed back to the first visitor center.

This display of the Wright boys when they were young playing with a flying toy was more meaningful after the movie that showed this toy sparking their interest in flight.

We also got to go inside their bike shop which was closed the first day we came by.