With reference to this posting:
 
This project was performed by USA-CERL (the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory of the United States Army Corps of Engineers) between 1990 and 1994, with publication in 1997.  Targets were the two small hangars the Wright Brothers used in 1904 and 1905, which were small sheds built more or less on the same plan they had used at Kitty Hawk.  Later on, the project looked at the footprint of the 1910 Hangar, built in that year and used by the Wright Company to test new planes and train pilots until 1916.  The 1910 hangar was a much more substantial post-in-ground structure, and about four times as large as the 1904 and 05 hangars.  Orville Wright recommended the Huffman Prairie area to the Army in 1917, as a good location for an airfield, part of the crash program by the Army to create an airforce when the U.S. entered World War I.  This was the beginning of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which owns the site to this day.
 
In 1990, USA-CERL conducted shovel testing and slot trenches across the area where a 1915 map located the 1910 Hangar.  This phase of the project did not find a foundation, but recovered extensive artifactual evidence of the 1910 Hangar, including nails, window glass, even a few airplane parts, principally links from the chain drives of the Wright Flyers.  Following this, USA-CERL contracted with NASA to perform infrared aerial photography, and the Waterways Laboratory of USA-COE to perform a magentormetry survey.  Both these surveys revealed anomalies that corresponded with the 1915 map, and located the 1910 Hangar.  Larger unit and mechanical stripping in this area found posts in the ground, associated either with the 1910 Hangar, or with fences around it.  In the end, the remote sensing and cartographical information were rather superior to the archaeological information, since the soil matrix at Huffman Prairie was a very dark, black gumbo clay, excellent at concealing organic remains, such as postholes.  I would say that all three of these emthods worked in concert, but the remote sensing definitely lead the way, in this case.
 
As for the 1904 and 05 hangars, in photographs, they look very like the post-on-sill shed the Wrights built at Kitty Hawk.  As such, they have no real archaeological visibility, and are probably not recoverable through any present archaeological or remote sensing methods.  Our best bet was oral history, of a sort--before he died in 1948, Orville Wright pointed out the approximate location of the early hangars, and the Air Force put up a cement pylon to mark the spot.  That's probably the best we can do, and I hope this story is better than a made-up rumor of bumbling soldiers, but clever archaeos.
 
D. Babson

________________________________

From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY on behalf of George Myers
Sent: Mon 9/15/2003 3:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WW I air service



Well, not to brag, I heard that the US government was trying to find the
locations of the hangars of the Wright brothers in Dayton, Ohio and had the
best of the their military out with their remote sensing looking for
evidence and could not. They hired a CRM guy who researched it and found the
locations, so the story went. I suppose they might be a good source of
information, and the story about stages rather than whose better.

George Myers