The story below is from our May/June 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Photo Courtesy of the Virginia Room
Roanokers had heard of aeroplanes but had never seen one fly. That changed with the Great Roanoke Fair of 1910 and the half-mile flight of a Curtiss Aeroplane.
Some thought it would never happen. For weeks, promoters of the Great Roanoke Fair of 1910 had been advertising the appearance of a Curtiss Aeroplane at the fairgrounds as a centerpiece for Roanoke’s most celebrated annual event.
The Great Roanoke Fair had started in 1902 and occurred every fall with various exhibits, balloon rides, excursions, horse racing and craft shows. The fair of 1910 was billed to exceed all previous ones. Some 300 horses participated in track events, and there were exhibitions of cattle, domestic arts, sheep, swine, poultry, farm machinery, canned goods and needlework. The Norfolk & Western and Virginian Railways had special trains to serve the fair for those attending from central and southwestern Virginia.
The fair also boasted “scores of censored sideshows,” and gambling was prohibited. There were premiums and purses totaling $20,000 ($480,000 in today’s dollars). Fair association president James Woods, however, considered the flight of a Curtiss Aeroplane to be the main attraction.
Arrangements for the Curtiss airship to come to Roanoke had begun in earnest weeks before the fair such that H.W. Sutton, a representative of Glenn Curtiss Exhibiting Company, came to the city and met with fair officials on September 12th. Sutton was shown the fairground by Louis Scholz and diagrams were made noting the terrain and surrounding mountains.
Sutton outlined for Scholz that certain accommodations would be needed such as posts being moved, and the wooden bleachers to the right of the baseball diamond and those in front of the east grandstand removed. Sutton described the craft to be brought to Roanoke as being 35 feet from “tip to tip” and 30 feet from its rudder to the end of its steering gear.
Roanokers had never witnessed a powered, heavier-than-air flight before. There had been hot air balloon rides in the past, but not the presence of an aeroplane. In fact, there had been only one such flight in Virginia, and that was a flight made by Orville Wright at Langley in 1909.
An aeroplane had tried to fly at the state fair in Richmond in the summer of 1910 but never got off the ground, much to the disappointment of fair organizers who had to explain to those in attendance why their tickets were not to be refunded! Thus, to have an aeroplane fly across the fairgrounds in Roanoke was historic.
The pilot was Eugene Ely, 24, of the Curtiss Aeroplane Company. Ely had flown elsewhere in exhibitions, most recently in Iowa at its state fair. His plane was loaded on a train there and shipped to Roanoke. (Early planes were disassembled, transported and then re-assembled by the pilots.) Ely and his flying machine arrived in Roanoke by train on September 21st, the second day of the fair. Attendance set a record as spectators anticipated Ely’s flight. Some even paid an additional 15 cents just to see Ely’s machine in its temporarily-erected garage near the fairground gates.
Ely surveyed the fairgrounds that morning, specifically the lay of land within the horse-racing track. Ely quickly became concerned as his machine needed 100 linear feet of running space to rise four feet. To clear the buildings, fence and wires at the end of the track, he would need 300 feet of ground. The ground provided to him, confined within the race track, was not enough. Only under exceptional conditions could he lift his machine into the air. (A Curtiss advance man had assured fair organizers the track’s infield was sufficient.)
Nonetheless, Ely told fair organizers he would try to fly at 2 p.m. Crowds thronged the track area. Ely and his machine managed to get lift but only to ten feet and over a space of 100 yards. Ely had to drop the plane, fearing he would flip the plane on the fairground’s fence. Unbeknownst to spectators, Ely had tried to convince fair officials that he would have better flying conditions if he could take off from a surrounding hillside, but they had insisted he fly within the fairgrounds’ perimeters.
This proved to be a mistake. The machine needed 400 more running feet than it had. The Roanoke Times took to task fair organizers for trying to dictate to Ely where he should fly when they knew nothing about his machine, a flying apparatus they described “has about as many whims and moods and notions as an unusually pretty girl of eighteen who has been spoiled and petted all her life.”
Ely noted the gentle hills of South Roanoke and told officials that if he could lift off from those heights he was confident Roanokers would witness their first flight of an aeroplane. Fair promoters quickly acquiesced to Ely’s request and told spectators that Ely would fly the next day.
At 5:40 p.m. on September 22nd, Eugene Ely and his Curtiss machine took off from a hill in South Roanoke just northeast of Virginia College as thousands watched from the fairgrounds. Ely was earlier concerned about wind gusts coming from the slopes of Mill Mountain, but by 5 p.m., a tethered balloon at the fairground, 400 feet in the air, held perfectly still.
Ely, eyeing the balloon from South Roanoke, got his chance and announced he would fly. Forty minutes later, Ely moved down the slope and gradually ascended in a northwesterly direction, crossed the Roanoke River west of the fairgrounds and then turned and came over the grounds, descending safely in the center of the infield.
“Thousands shrieked with delight when the flying machine hover in sight and every movement was watched with intense interest,” reported the Times.
The day Ely flew was “Old Soldiers Day” at the fair, and Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate, had been admitted for free. One can only imagine their thoughts as the aged men watched a man take flight. Ely had flown a half mile and into Roanoke history.
Fair organizers hoped to have Ely return the following year, but the young aviator died tragically on his twenty-fifth birthday in 1911 when his Curtiss aeroplane failed to pull out of a dive at an exhibition in Macon, Georgia.
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