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In 1916, Dayton industrialists Charles Kettering and Edward Deeds purchased the “Idylwild” estate of Daniel Eldridge Mead and a larger adjacent tract to save it from development and to create a park for their companies. The resulting “Triangle Park,” opened with a July 4, 1917, picnic for employees and their families. A few weeks later, on July 15, the site became the WWI recruitment site for nearly two hundred men enlisting as “Camp Triangle, Battery D, 1st Ohio Field Artillery.” The park served as the home of company football team the Dayton Triangles and was the site of the 1920 first NFL game. In 1941, Deeds and Kettering gave the park to the City of Dayton to ensure its continued recreational use forever as “a gathering place.”
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The Dayton Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center was established by Congressional legislation signed by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1865. One of the three original VA Hospitals in the United States, Dayton received its first Civil War Veterans in 1867. Although officially The Central Branch of the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, the facility became known as Dayton Soldiers Home. By 1884, it was a self-sufficient planned community, providing hospital, living quarters, gardens, and amenities to 64 percent of the Veterans receiving institutional care from the U.S. government. An early tourist attraction, the campus boasted 517,106 visitors in 1906. Today, the Dayton VA Medical Center is a modern healthcare facility that continues to honor President Lincoln’s promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”
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The facilities once here propelled the United States through the Nuclear and Space Ages and were named for the nearby pre-historic Miamisburg Mound. The Manhattan Engineer District of the War Department began construction of Mound Laboratory in 1946. The facility consolidated production of the nuclear-reaction initiators, developed for the United States’ first atomic bombs during World War II. Previously (1943-1946), the work to separate, purify, and process the element polonium used in these initiators occurred at facilities throughout the Dayton area. Mound Laboratory was the nation’s first permanent post-WWII Atomic Energy Commission site. Mound Laboratory had 116 buildings and at its peak employed approximately 2,500 scientists, engineers, and skilled workers. Contractors operating at the site were Monsanto (1947-1988), Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (1988-1997), and Babcock and Wilcox (1997-2002). (Continued on other side)
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Ernest “Ernie” C. Hall, a pioneer of early flight who is widely recognized for his long career in aviation, was born near Warren, Ohio in 1890. A friend of the Wright brother, Hall built his first powered airplane in 1909 and flew in 1911. He began his career as a civilian flight instructor in 1913, opening a flying school in Pennsylvania in 1915. During World War I, he transferred to Call Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he trained over 500 military pilots for combat. In 1922, Hall relocated his flight school to Warren, Ohio, where he taught unitl his death in 1972. His 1911 monoplanes have been displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. and the National Museum of U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
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Dayton Woman’s Club. Community leader Robert Steele built the house that became the Dayton Woman’s Club between 1845 and 1850. Napoleon Bonaparte Darst, a wealthy merchant, bought the residence in 1861. After the Civil War he refurbished the structure, updating it to the then-popular Second Empire style. In 1916, Darst’s heirs sold the house to the newly-formed Dayton Woman’s Club. Mrs. Marie Kumler (1856-1925), first president of the Club and the Dayton Federation of Women’s Clubs led efforts to raise the $25,000 to purchase the property. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and the Club celebrated 100 years here in 2016.
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Near this site in Over-The-Rhine was one of the original Kroger Grocery & Baking Company stores, where Bernard H. Kroger began serving the Over-the-Rhine area in 1902. Kroger was 23 years old when he opened his first store, The Great Western Tea Company, at 66 East Pearl Street near the Cincinnati Riverfront in July of 1883. By 1902, when the company was incorporated as the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company, Kroger operated 40 stores. By 1908, the company had grown to a chain of 136 stores in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky, and began making deliveries to customers with 200 mule-drawn wagons. Kroger was the first to combine meats and groceries under one roof and the first grocery company to operate its own bakery. Currently called the Kroger Co., the grocer is a major contributor to the local economy.
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A newer use for the airplanes after World War I was mail delivery. Airplanes moved mail faster than trains, but flying only during daylight hours slowed delivery and flying at night was dangerous. The Army Air Service constructed an experimental lighted beacon route for night flying between Columbus and Dayton in 1923. With proof that such a system could work, the U.S. Postal Service developed what later enthusiasts call a “highway of light” to guide air mail pilots on the transcontinental routes between New York to San Francisco and across the nation. (Continued on other side)
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Established in 1851 after the addition of the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railway, Glendale incorporated in 1855 as Ohio’s first planned community and one of the nation’s first planned villages. The original planning included forested greenbelts and parks, curvilinear streets meandering around established trees, large lots, and superior building standards. Glendale is designated as a National Historic Landmark community from the Department of Interior and a Certified Local Government through the Ohio Historic Preservation Office, all owed to Glendale’s persistent adherence to the plan and faithful preservation of original infrastructure. Much of today’s preserved infrastructure includes the original 59 pivotal buildings, curvilinear streets, tree canopy, stone gutters, gas streetlights, and railroad depot.
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