Belle Valley: When the Sky Fell

Belle Valley in Noble County was a coal town. Benton Thorla opened the first store and saloon here in eighteen seventy-two, and the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad soon extended to the village to haul coal. At its peak Belle Valley had more than fifteen hundred residents and thirteen saloons.

Then on September third, nineteen twenty-five, something fell out of the sky that put this small village on front pages across the country. The USS Shenandoah, the United States Navy's first helium-filled rigid airship, six hundred and eighty feet long and weighing thirty-six tons, was caught in a violent overnight storm over Noble County. Three successive updrafts and downdrafts twisted the metal frame until it broke apart in the air. Fourteen crew members died, including commander Zachary Lansdowne. Wreckage fell across a wide swath of farmland near Belle Valley. Occurring a full decade before the Hindenburg disaster, the Shenandoah crash generated international headlines and pushed the Navy to fundamentally reconsider its airship program. Noble County still commemorates the crash each year.