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Dayton is a city in southwestern Ohio and seat of Montgomery County. The city is at the confluence of the Mad, Stillwater, and Great Miami rivers and Wolf Creek. The hub of a large metropolitan area, Dayton is a commercial, transportation, cultural, and industrial center. The city has a long history of invention. Today the leading employers in Dayton include a maker of computer hardware and software--particularly for financial transactions--and a national online legal and business information service. A center of aerospace and high-technology development, Dayton was the home of aircraft pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright, and the city lays claim to being the Birthplace of Aviation. Scheduled air service is through James M. Cox Dayton International Airport, which also hosts an annual air show.
Educational institutions in Dayton include the University of Dayton (1850), United Theological Seminary (1871), the Air Force Institute of Technology (1919), Wright State University (1964), and a community college. In 1992 several geographically separated sites mostly associated with the development of aviation were designated as the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. It includes the Wright Brothers bicycle shop, the airfield where they tested their inventions, and one of their earliest airplanes, housed in Wright Hall at Carillon Historical Park. Extensive exhibits on the history of the Miami Valley are also on display at Carillon. Also associated with the national historical park is the home of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first black writers to achieve international recognition.
Dayton's old courthouse (1850) is the focus of a city-center development, which was begun in the 1950s and includes a large convention center. Other cultural institutions include the Dayton Museum of Natural History and the Dayton Art Institute. Nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is one of the area's largest employers; its air force museum is a major tourist attraction. Just southwest of Dayton is the Miamisburg Mound, one of the largest Native American burial mounds in eastern North America.
European settlement of Dayton began in 1796. The town was named for one of its developers, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, who at the time was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and who was the youngest signer of the Constitution of the United States. Dayton became a prosperous manufacturing center following the opening of the Miami-Erie Canal in 1829 and the arrival of the railroad in 1851. The city incorporated in 1841.
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