Dayton historical timeline

Dayton’s history turns on two things: a very great deal of invention, and a flood.

Founding and industry

Settled in 1796 at the river confluence and connected by canal to the Ohio in 1829. Water power and then coal built an industrial base in machine tools, railway carriages and paper.

Invention

National Cash Register, founded in 1884, became a research culture as much as a manufacturer and trained a generation of engineers, among them Charles Kettering, who invented the electric starter and ran research for General Motors from here. By the 1890s Wilbur and Orville Wright were running a bicycle business on West Third Street and using its workshop and its understanding of balance and control to solve flight. They flew at Kitty Hawk in December 1903 for the wind and the sand, and then came home and spent 1904 and 1905 at Huffman Prairie turning the machine into something that could bank, turn and land — which is the harder problem and the one Dayton solved.

The 1913 flood

In March 1913 the four rivers rose together and put downtown under up to six metres of water for days, killing over 360 people in the city. The response was extraordinary: a locally funded conservancy district built five dry dams and deepened the channels, and it has held ever since. The enabling legislation became a national model.

The Dayton Agreement

In November 1995 the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia were brought to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and kept there for three weeks until they produced the agreement that ended the Bosnian war. The base was chosen for its isolation and its secure accommodation, and the city has marked the anniversary since; the peace accords carry its name.

Decline

Manufacturing left from the 1970s and the population halved; the air force base and healthcare now sustain the region.