Dayton

Known as the Birthplace of Aviation, Dayton/Montgomery County is located at one of the busiest Crossroads of America, where the I-75 north/south meets the I-70 east/west. We’re proud to offer you accessibility and affordability, coupled with world-class attractions, diverse accommodations, fantastic arts and culture performances, beautiful parks and trails, a variety of sporting venues and events, plus fabulous shopping and dining.

Dayton is a city in southwestern Ohio, United States. It is the county seat and largest city of Montgomery County.

Dayton plays host to significant industrial, aerospace, and technological/engineering research activity and is known for the many technical innovations and inventions developed there. The city was the home of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought an end to the war in Bosnia. The Wright brothers, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and entrepreneur John H. Patterson were born in Dayton. The Dayton area is home to several major international, national, and regional corporations, including NCR, Reynolds & Reynolds, Cargill, ChemStation International, Liberty Bank, NewPage Corporation, Standard Register, WorkflowOne (formerly Relizon), Huffy Bicycles, LexisNexis, and Mead prior to becoming MeadWestvaco. It was formerly home of Speedwell Motor Car Company.

Dayton History

Dayton in 1870Dayton was founded on April 1, 1796 by a small group of US settlers seven years before the admission of Ohio to the Union in 1803. The town was incorporated in 1805 and given its name after Jonathan Dayton, a captain in the American Revolutionary War and signatory of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1797, Daniel C. Cooper laid out the Mad River Road, the first overland connection between Cincinnati, Ohio and Dayton. This opened up the “Mad River Country” at Dayton and the upper Miami Valley to settlement.

The Miami and Erie Canal, built in the 1830s, connected the Dayton commerce from Lake Erie via the Great Miami River and served as the principal route of transportation for western Ohio until the 1850s.

The catastrophic Great Dayton Flood of March 1913 severely affected much of the city, stimulated the growth of suburban communities outside central Dayton in areas lying further from the Miami River and on higher ground, and led to the establishment of the Miami Conservancy District in 1914. The flood remains an event of note in popular memory and local histories. The high waters damaged some of the Wright Brothers’ glass plate photographic negatives of their glider flights at Kitty Hawk and power flights over Huffman Prairie near Dayton.

Dayton’s Involvement in World War II

During World War II Dayton, like many other American cities, was heavily involved in the war effort. Residential neighborhoods in Dayton and in nearby Oakwood hosted the Dayton Project, in which the Monsanto Chemical Company developed methods to industrially produce polonium for use in the triggers of early atomic bombs, including those dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Dayton was also home to the National Cash Register Company whose employees built airplane engines, bomb sights and code-breaking machines, including the American bombe designed by Joseph Desch which helped crack the Enigma machine.

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