Wright-Patterson: Where the Wright Brothers' Hometown Became the Air Force's Brain
Near Dayton, Ohio
A few miles east of Dayton, spread across nearly nine thousand acres of Ohio countryside, sits Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the largest single-site employer in the entire state of Ohio, with more than thirty thousand military and civilian workers. Its name connects two stories: the Wright Brothers, who changed everything in a field near here, and a young pilot named Frank Patterson who died in a test crash in nineteen eighteen, eight years before he could see where aviation would go.
The base has roots in nineteen seventeen, when the Army established a training field on land adjacent to the Wright Brothers' old flying grounds at Huffman Prairie. After the war the site became Wright Field, and through the nineteen twenties and thirties it was the national center for military aviation research and development, the place where the Army Air Corps tested new aircraft designs, pushed engines to their limits, and worked out the engineering problems that would define air power for the next generation.
World War Two transformed Wright Field from a research outpost into a massive industrial-military hub. Its population swelled from fewer than four thousand personnel to more than fifty thousand in just a few years. Thousands of aircraft were tested, modified, and cleared for combat here.
In January of nineteen forty-eight, Wright Field and adjacent Patterson Field were merged into a single installation, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, just months after the Air Force became an independent branch of the military.
But the single most consequential event in the base's history came in November of nineteen ninety-five, when delegations from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia were brought to the Hope Hotel on the base grounds and kept in proximity talks for three weeks. On November twenty-first, they initialed the Dayton Accords, ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia that had killed more than one hundred thousand people. A place named for two brothers who first flew in nineteen oh three had become the site where a European war was put to rest.
