Wright Brothers

Wright Brothers
National Memorial
North Carolina

U.S. Department of the Interior
National Park Service

THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL FLIGHT OF AN AIRPLANE WAS MADE FROM THIS SPOT BY ORVILLE WRIGHT DECEMBER 17,1903 IN A MACHINE DESIGNED AND BUILT BY WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT. THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED BY THE NATIONAL AERONAUTIC ASSOCIATON OF THE USA DECEMBER 17, 1928 TO COMMEMORATE THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS EVENT.

Identifying the exact location of the flight was problematic because the dunes and hills had shifted considerably over the years following the Wrights' experiments. On November 4, 1928, under the direction of the NAA, Captain William Tate organized a meeting of three of the four surviving witnesses to the first flight to determine the point of takeoff. Using Orville Wright's accounts of the flight, Will Dough, Adam Etheridge, and Johnny Moore identified the approximate location of the first flight takeoff. Tate presented the method of determination at the marker's dedication ceremonies:

Dough, Etheridge, Moore, and I assembled here and I explained to them the importance of arriving at a definite conclusion with respect to the spot where the Wright brothers' airplane, in making its first successful flight, first began to move along the ground. We located the four corners of the building in which the machine was housed…. We took into consideration what Mr. Orville Wright said about it in his article How We Made Our First Flight. We had a compass with us and we were sure of our compass course. After considering all these things and talking it over these other three men proceeded by themselves to come out here on this point and select the spot on which this magnificent boulder stands and said that this was the spot where the Wright airplane started its first successful flight…. After agreeing upon this exact spot we signed a paper to that effect….

The day before the granite marker's unveiling, the delegates from the International Civil Aeronautics Conference traveled to the site on a steamer. Due to heavy fog, the travelers, including Orville Wright and other family members, spent the night in Norfolk, Virginia, transferring to buses for the final seventy-five-mile trip to the Outer Banks. Reaching the end of the improved roads, the passengers transferred to a fleet of seventy automobiles, which in turn carried them over a system of temporary corduroy and mud roads to the ferry at Point Harbor. At Kitty Hawk they changed to a second fleet of cars, which took them over a new road to a barbecue and turkey lunch near the site. After lunch they made the final trip to the Kill Devil Hills for the unveiling and dedication of the marker. More than 3,000 other spectators, arriving by boat, private car, mule, and pony cart, joined the group at the site.

W.O. Saunders, Senator Hiram Bingham, and Secretary of War Dwight Davis addressed the gathering. After the laying of the cornerstone, the Norfolk Naval Station band played "The Star-Spangled Banner." The crowd then moved down the hill to be near the marker designating the point of take-off in 1903. Orville stood by the well-known aviator Amelia Earhart, barely recognizable in her cloche hat. The boulder was sheathed in a parachute of white silk, which Mary Byrd Saunders and Florence Ballard, both of Elizabeth City, ceremoniously removed. Simultaneously, a sailor from the Norfolk Naval Station released a flight of fifteen carrier pigeons "which put on a formation of spirals and turns before turning northward toward their home." Following another rendition of the national anthem, the crowd dispersed, returning over the next few days in an operation compared by the press to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, to their various homes.

The placement of the rock-faced marker with inscription initiated the commemorative development of the Wright brothers memorial site.

Credits: William R. Chapman and Jill K. Hanson, Wright Brothers National Memorial Historic Resource Study; January, 1997