By this 1920 map things were already on the ground in Moraine City

 

 

…and were built by 1919.  This was the physical start of Moraine as an industrial suburb.

 

 

In 1916 or 1917 Delco-Light, AKA the Domestic Engineering Company, built a plant out here. I think they had a plant already in Dayton, on the Tech Town site, so this might have been the second plant. Delco-l\Light was Charles Ketterings solution to rural electrification via private generators for individual farms.

 

However, the plant never went into production. The empty factory was purchased by Dayton-Wright Aircraft, expanded, and fitted out for aircraft production. 

 

The first section of Moraine City was platted by this time, too. Dayton-Wright was not the only industry , being joined by a foundry and a boiler factory.

 

The foundry sometime before 1940, looking down the interurban tracks.

 

 

The foundry survives to this day as something to do with industrial gasses and welding.

 

 

..the last industrial survivor from the beginnings of Moraine.

 

 

The "Smith Gas Engineering" plant was a big high-bay erecting shop with flanking side shops, sort of like a large version of the old Foundry Nightclub building

 

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The factory was later used as the shops and offices for the interurban, by this time renamed the C&LE.

 

 

The largest plant, and ancestor to todays Moraine Assembly, was the Dayton-Wright plant. There are no good exterior pix of the place, but it was apparently a long one story building, perhaps with interior mezzanines.

 

What's interesting from this photo is the woodworking aspect, the lack of auto parking, and the military presence since the predecessor of the Air Force was active here in helping with the engineering as well as perhaps furnishing the pilots to fly the finished planes out of Moraine.

 

 

A close up of the Sanborn showing the same area of the plant in the pix.

 

 

And the entire Sanborn.  Maybe not visible here, but there is extensive use of clerestory roofs to maximize daylighting. Not energy efficient, but the plant had it's own steam system to provide heat.

 

 

This Sanborn has quite a bit of labeling of the industrial activity taking place in the factory spaces. One can see kilns and lumber sheds, indicating they were drying out green lumber before cutting it up into parts (or maybe they stuck the parts in the kilns).

 

 

The labeling permits this hypothetical reconstruction of the industrial process at the plant. One can see that since aircraft were built of wood there was a big woodworking aspect to the process to make the parts that would be eventually go into sub-assemblies, which would the be put together in final assembly.

 

 

There were two Dayton-Wright plants in area, a components plant in nearby Miamisburg, and the former Wright Brothers plant in West Dayton. I think they got engines and engine parts from Detroit, too.

 

An example of final assembly, where sub-assemblies are put together into the final product (and note the generous daylighting).

 

 

The final product: a DeHavilland observer/bomber plane (a British design). Over 4,000 aircraft were built in Moraine during WWI.

 

 

 

 

Dayton-Wright had Orville Wright on staff but had no direct connection to the Wright Brothers early manufacturing activity.  The principles where the Delco-Light and GM affiliate founder Charles Kettering, and NCR executives Edward Deeds and Charles Talbot. Dayton-Wright was sold to GM in 1919 and GM got out of the aircraft business in 1923. Deeds remained active in aviation as one of the founders and chairman of the board of Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines.

 

It's unclear whether aircraft manufacturing ceased in 1920 or 1923. But shortly after WWI the Dayton-Wright principles tried to interest the miltary in the property as a replacement to McCook Field. Preliminary plans were drawn up incorporating the Dayton-Wright plant into a new aviation research facility/airfield.

 

 

This was not pursued. Moraine did not replace McCook. McCooks replacement was built in the late 1920s to the east of the city, not south; todays Wright Field.

 

The empty plant at Moraine was to be put to other uses.

 

 

Why did Dayton not annex this area and all its taxable industry?

Awesome!

Another fascinating piece of research, Jeffrey.

 

In the museum at Cass, WV, is a letter from one of the Wright Brothers, inquiring about the purchase of spruce lumber to be used in airplane construction.

 

Nerd Stuff - My brother once picked up a workable Delco-Light generator at an auction, and we set it up in the workshop with some automobile batteries and wired up a couple of lights.

 

Here's a diagram that I found at http://www.oldengine.org/, showing a Delco-Light farm lighting system. A single-cylinder air-cooled engine is direct-coupled to a 32-volt direct-current generator that charges a set of 16 series-connected 2-volt lead-acid battery cells. The batteries used replaceable separators and lead plates in glass jars with the top sealed in place with high-temperature wax or tar, and every town had at least one business that rebuilt lighting batteries.

 

To start the generator, you prime it with gasoline or naptha and then pull up on a small lever attached to a relay. The generator draws power from the batteries and functions as a starting motor to spin the engine until it starts. Once started, the engine runs on kerosene from its fuel tank.

 

Once the batteries reach full charge, if there is no other load on the system, the start/run relay de-energizes and shuts off the engine. Later models are able to sense a load or low batteries and start themselves. Some use small four-cylinder inline air-cooled engines.

 

In the era when these systems were built, there were other makers like Western Electric who built competing systems. Usually they used different voltages (WE used 40 volts) to lock buyers into buying their line of appliances. There were refrigerators, washing machines, light bulbs, etc. that ran with these systems. The light bulbs fit a standard screw base; I still have some 30-volt GE bulbs squirrelled away somewhere.

 

Not sure why Dayton didnt annex.  This was well outside the city limits at the time.

 

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Rob thanks for the information on Delco-Light.  I was curious on how these operated.  I guess rural electrification replaced this technology, but were these farm power systems tht widespread?  I figure they were pretty expensive.

 

The plant that made these was in downtown Dayton.  It was a loft factory building and a low rise sawtooth roof annex.  The loft was still standing as of this year, but it was gutted and is slated for demolition.

 

The plant was later (partially) converted to refrigerator operations as Frigidaire plant 1. 

 

 

 

Yes, I think Delco-Light systems were pricey. So far as I know, there was only one dealer in my home town who sold them, and he was a greedy skinflint whom Ebenezer Scrooge would have been proud to have had as a son.

 

The generator sets came with a set of tools necessary to service them, all bundled up in a cloth bag. For years after the old guy died and the hardware store closed, the one-time loft apartment in the upstairs of his building was left unused and untouched. Some years ago the current owner of the building decided to renovate the space for his own residence, and in cleaning it out, they found dozens of those tool sets all piled in one of the rooms. The old guy had kept the tool sets and instruction manuals for all the systems he sold, so that his customers would have to call on him (and pay him) for maintenance and repair.

 

When we moved to our farm in 1947 a few neighbors still didn't have electricity even though the lines ran down their roads, simply because they couldn't afford or weren't willing to pay for connection and service. All of those still used kerosene lamps for lighting and coal- or wood-burning stoves for heating and cooking and none had Delco-Light systems, for the same reason they weren't hooked up to commercial power; they were too poor or too cheap.

 

The place where our family moved had been a prosperous operation, with the owner running a carpentry and construction business in addition to farming. He had made a bundle, too, selling walnut trees that were abundant on the property during WWI, when they were used to make military rifle stocks.

 

Although the generator and batteries were long-gone when we moved there, the commercial electrification simply had been connected into the existing wiring. Houses with Delco-Light systems were wired to the same standards as city houses on commercial power, in order to facilitate future conversion. They used cloth-covered 10AWG wire and porcelain insulators, with either recessed push-button switches or surface-mounted twist-knob switches.

Great research, Jeffrey!