Brady Kress, a former Dayton History tour guide who is now the organization’s chief executive, said visitors have long enjoyed “eclectic” sites at Carillon, but they could still walk away without a clear understanding of the area’s entrepreneurial history. After all, Dayton, once known as “the city of a thousand factories,” was the 7th largest industrial center in the United States as recently as 1968, he said.
“I don’t know if guests understood that,” Kress said.
The center will include the barn of engineer Edward Deeds, who worked with fellow industrialist and inventor Charles Kettering and others, inventing automotive components such as the self-starter. The barn birthed what became “DELCO” (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co.)
Within the Deeds barn, visitors will be able to go “full circle,” Kress said, seeing the 1912 Cadillac owned by the Kettering family and the last vehicle assembled at the General Motors SUV plant in Moraine, a white GMC Envoy. GM closed the plant in 2008.
There will also be at least two walls of vintage wood, brass and chrome National Cash Register machines, as well as a segment devoted to later Dayton-bred NCR innovations.
There will even be an animatronics theater in which robots will perform as Deeds, Kettering NCR founder John Patterson and the Wright brothers, regaling audiences with tales of Dayton innovations.
And at the end of the show, the machines will turn to listeners and urge them to be a part of Dayton’s future, Kress said. There will be a segment devoted to technologies of tomorrow being nurtured here, including composites and fuel cells, he said.
“The idea is to create some kind of inspiration for all of our guests, not just local, but national and international,” Kress said.
John Heitmann, a University of Dayton professor of automotive history, is looking forward to the exhibit. He recently taught at the University of San Diego.
He said his students from Southern California were fascinated by Dayton’s history.
“When you teach a class on auto or American life, there’s a lot of Dayton history there,” Heitmann said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2390 or tgnau@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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