The Interurbans

I enjoyed reading the article on interurban trolleys in the Spring 1993 issue (“The Wrong Track,” by George W. Hilton). One of those trolley lines ran from Dayton to Springfield, Ohio, and passed the Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture used by the Wright Brothers in 1904 and 1905 to conduct their flying experiments to make their airplane a practical and useful machine. They knew that Kitty Hawk was only the beginning. One reason they selected this site was that they could get to it by trolley, since there was a station near where they lived, about eight miles out of Dayton.

They were at first careful not to have the aircraft flying when the trolley came by, but they soon found that almost no one was interested in what they were doing anyway. They were making history, unnoticed, along the interurban tracks.

R. G. Elmendorf
Bairdford, Pa.