Huffman Prairie Flying Field — Public Lands Institute

Ordovician453-444 Mya

~453 to 444 Mya Late Ordovician Waynesville and Arnheim Formations, interbedded shale and limestone, buried here beneath the Mad River's Wisconsinan valley fill of sand and gravel; the field's own ground is Linwood muck over Westland silty clay loam, a wet prairie soil poorly suited to row crops, which is why it stayed in pasture.

Epoch

Late Ordovician (Cincinnatian Series, Richmondian) bedrock; Wisconsinan to Holocene buried valley fill

Native lands Glossary →

Shawnee (Shawanwaki) · Myaamia (Miami); the Mad River wet prairies lay between the Shawnee towns of Chalahgawtha (Old Chillicothe) on the Little Miami north of present Xenia and Peckuwe (Piqua) upriver near present Springfield, where George Rogers Clark's Kentucky militia fought the Shawnee on August 8 1780 after burning Chalahgawtha; federal survey notes of 1802 describe this ground as wet, boggy prairie near the Mad River; Shawnee and Miami ceded southwestern Ohio via the Treaty of Greene Ville, August 3 1795.

Displacement & Tenure

Cession 11: Treaty of Greene Ville (1795). The flying field is the northeast quarter of Section 1, Township 2, Range 8, Bath Township, in the Congress Lands between the Miamis, surveyed into six-mile townships after 1798 and sold through the Cincinnati land office. William P. Huffman took the tract from his father in 1847 and Torrence Huffman inherited it about 1870, lending the pasture to the Wright brothers rent free in 1904. The Miami Conservancy District bought the Huffman land in 1915 for the Huffman Dam retarding basin, the Army leased roughly 2,100 acres around the field in 1917 for Wilbur Wright Field, and the ground is now owned by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, with the National Park Service administering it as a unit of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, authorized October 16 1992.

Shadow History

The flying field survives because everything around it was taken, first for flood control and then for the military. After the March 1913 flood, the Miami Conservancy District built Huffman Dam off the field's southwestern corner between 1918 and 1923, bought the Huffman property into the retarding basin, moved the interurban line to higher ground in 1919, and razed the Wrights' 1910 hangar in 1938. Nearly the whole village of Osborn, two miles away and inside the basin, was moved rather than flooded: the relocation began in 1922 and took about two years, with close to 200 houses and several frame businesses hauled to a new plat beside Fairfield, and the two towns merged in 1950 as Fairborn. The field is now enclosed by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which EPA placed on the National Priorities List on October 4 1989; the base's Installation Restoration Program covers roughly 65 to 71 sites, among them thirteen landfills, twelve earth fill disposal areas, nine fuel or chemical spill sites, five fire training areas, and four chemical burial sites, with trichloroethylene and other chlorinated solvents found in on-base wells from 1985, and the base sits over the Mad River buried valley aquifer, a sole source aquifer supplying drinking water for about 500,000 people. A combat arms training range and the base Rod and Gun Club were built at the south end of the flying field around 1960; the Park Service's own cultural landscape inventory records them as a visual and auditory intrusion, a limit on public access, and a possible environmental issue for the field.

Ecology

One of Ohio's largest surviving tallgrass prairie remnants: at least three dozen prairie indicator species on the flying field itself, including big bluestem, Indian grass, prairie cordgrass, and little bluestem with ox-eye, black-eyed Susan, and gray-headed coneflower; the adjoining 109-acre Huffman Prairie, an Ohio State Natural Landmark since 1986, carries more than 300 flowering species and is among the region's most significant grassland bird habitats. The Nature Conservancy restored the prairie with the Air Force beginning in 1990; Wright-Patterson and Five Rivers MetroParks manage it now.

Hydrology

Mad River, a Great Miami tributary, immediately southwest behind Huffman Dam, with Hebble Creek draining the base to the Mad; the field lies inside the dam's retarding basin and stays seasonally wet on Linwood muck; the Mad River buried valley aquifer beneath is a sole source aquifer supplying about 500,000 people.

Acreage

GPS

39.8033° N, 84.0658° W

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