Wapakoneta: First on the Moon, Last Exit Before Space

The Shawnee had a village here along the Auglaize River for generations before American settlers platted a town in eighteen thirty-three and kept the Shawnee name, Wapakoneta. The town stayed quiet through the industrial age, a small county seat in western Ohio farm country. Then on August fifth, nineteen thirty, Neil Alden Armstrong was born on his grandparents' farm just outside of town.

He got his pilot's license at Port Koneta Airfield before he finished high school. On July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, he became the first human being to step onto the Moon. Three years to the day after the landing, Ohio opened the Armstrong Air and Space Museum here, housing his Gemini Eight capsule and Moon rock.

Wapakoneta has a population of just under ten thousand people and one of the most extraordinary hometown stories on Earth.