The future of the historic Wright brothers' airplane factory in West Dayton is up in the air after it was heavily damaged in a fire in late March.
The city doesn't have a final assessment on the structures or how the fire started.
Passerbys might dismiss the long-vacant old, white brick buildings on West Third Street as any other abandoned factory. The graffiti-tagged property is surrounded by a rusty chain link fence. The lot is covered with gravel and dirt.
But what the Wright brothers did here and in other sites in Dayton was the genesis of aerospace, the U.S. Air Force and commercial flight, said Dan Patterson, a local aviation historian.
The west-facing brick facade of the hangars is still recognizable. But a peek through the windows of Building One reveals the steel and wooden roof has collapsed and some of the original wooden window frames are also burned.
“These buildings, the original part of these buildings, are gone. And Orville and Wilbur Wright were here. You can walk on their footsteps over here,” Patterson said. “And now what's original has collapsed. It’s a shame.”
He said the legacy of the Wright brothers in Dayton has been slowly drifting away.
“It's just the way it is. There’s a lot of talk, but not much action,” Patterson said.
That’s because the Wright family home and one of their bicycle shops are no longer in Dayton. They were bought by Henry Ford and taken to Dearborn, Michigan, in 1936.
Then, the brothers flying school at Huffman Prairie was torn down. Orville Wright’s laboratory in West Dayton was also torn down in the 1970s.
In 2021, the city demolished the brothers' first bicycle shop, after the building was declared a nuisance. The brothers fourth bicycle shop still remains, after it was purchased and restored by the nonprofit Dayton Aviation Trail.
Patterson added that the Wright Company airplane factory is now one of the few places still standing in Dayton that tells the story about how two brothers changed the way people travel. It was the first place in the world built to mass produce airplanes.
The two original hangars were built between 1910 and 1911. More than 100 planes were made there before Orville Wright sold his stake in the company in 1915.
Eventually the site had a long, second life as a Delphi and General Motors plant until that closed in 2008.
The city bought the 54-acre property five years ago for $1 million. The following year, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places — preservationists had lobbied for more than a decade to receive the special site designation.
“And then a lot of nothing happened. Until the fire,” Patterson said.
Progress to redevelop and secure the factory has been slow.
Like many old industrial properties, environmental pollution needed to be remediated. So the city worked with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency on a $5 million cleanup of the brownfield. A state grant paid for $3 million of that cost.
Todd Kinskey, Dayon’s director of the department of planning, said even though the site was remediated, the city was waiting on the Ohio EPA to move forward.
"You get a status that tells you what you can and can't do there. And so we were cleared for redevelopment, but they still had to sign off on those things before they could move forward,” Kinskey said. “It took us between four or five months to get EPA approval to do the work we're proposing to do. So we really got slowed down.”
Some redevelopment has started — with the new $12 million Dayton West Branch Library. Plans also call for a park with trails, and a plaza for retail stores and restaurants.
The plan has been to sell hangars one and two, which are also the parts of the building most damaged by the fire, to the National Park Service for a museum. The federal agency manages portions of the site, including the two historic buildings, although it doesn’t own it.
Kendell Thompson, superintendent of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, said in 2018 the federal government earmarked $450,000 to purchase the two buildings. Because of the environmental cleanup, there’s been a lot of paperwork to transfer ownership.
“The cleanup process has taken quite a long time,” Thompson said. “And one of the things that the National Park Service does is very careful due diligence when we're talking about acquiring something. We don't want to saddle the American people with an expensive problem."
Kinskey said the city was close to finalizing the deal. But that’s on hold now due to the fire.
“We just need to get more information about the building. We've already had a preliminary analysis from an engineering firm, but they were not able to get in the building,” Kinskey said. “And so I think we're very far away from knowing at this point what the final outcome is going to be.”
The federal agency is waiting on more information, Thompson said.
“The fire is definitely giving us pause. Since that building was largely an open space, I just don't know. It's too early to say what impact this is going to have,” Thompson said.
An internal city memo dated April 11 says the city is still waiting on a final report from its structural engineering firm. The city is reviewing a draft plan on how to access the entire site to evaluate the property safely.
“A projection of which elements of the structure can be saved is premature at this time. Additionally, no preliminary damages estimates are currently available,” the memo says.
The city is now ordering a nine-foot chain link fence to be installed.
For now, the burned buildings sit there — silently telling the story of two brothers from Dayton who decided to do the impossible.
Alejandro Figueroa is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.
