Integrated Learning-Living Communities

The BEES divided into smaller cohorts one last time to visit the Carillon Historical Park.

Ostensibly a celebration of Dayton’s innovations — the Wright brothers’ commercially viable airplane (the 1905 Flyer), Kettering’s ignition system for vehicles (replacing the crank), Fraze’s pop-tab, National Cash Register’s novel sales system.

Dayton’s manufacturing prowess — in cash registers (NCR), in trains (Barney & Smith Car Company),  printing (McCall’s Publishing), in bicycles (Huffy Corporation) and in vehicles (cars (DELCO) and planes) (the Wright Company) — gave it the status of highest patents per person 1903.

But the park also reveals the dark side of many inventions. Kettering’s employee Thomas Midgley came up with leaded gasoline and the refrigerant FREON/CFCs (a derivative of methane) — arguably two of the most devastating air pollutants of the 20th century.  

BEES were able ride on a vintage carousel and train. They were also able to tour the oldest building in Dayton — The Newcom Tavern (1796) — which served as a saloon, hotel, courthouse, jail and school in Dayton’s early years.  

The pivotal role of water in fueling Dayton’s development was made abundantly clear. Just as the Great Miami River, and later the Miami-Erie Canal, enabled Dayton to get its agricultural products to market, power generated by water mills enabled Dayton to dominate the printing industry.  By 1937, printing was the second largest industry in the United State. Twenty-five of Ohio’s 36 paper mills were located in the Miami Valley, and those mills supplied 77 printing companies, most deploying the cutting-edge Linotype machinery. McCall’s alone produced 4 million magazines daily: Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Popular Science and Reader’s Digest.  

Even the Barney and Smith railcars had to travel by barge to Cincinnati to be placed on tracks.

A subsequent exhibit illustrated the dangers of being underwater — literally: The 1913 flood which inundated downtown Dayton but left St. Mary’s Institute (the precursor of the University of Dayton) high if not dry.

Water, of course, would figure prominently in the last field trip of the fall:  an ice-skating outing at the Riverscape Ice Rink in downtown Dayton, located just where the major canal introduced barges into the Great Miami River.