from OhioHistoryCentral.com

In 1796, Israel Ludlow founded the town of Dayton along the Miami River near the mouth of the Mad River. It was located near the Symmes Purchase. By the end of that same year, more than forty log cabins and frame houses existed in the community. Many of these original settlers believed that they had legally acquired the land, but disputes quickly arose over landownership due to poor surveying. Many residents ended up paying additional sums of money to become the official owners of their property. In addition to the disputed land claims, Dayton was built on a flood plain, and the community flooded numerous times in its early years.

When Ohio became a state in 1803, Dayton became the seat of Montgomery County. Beyond Dayton's initial growth, however, the town remained relatively small until the War of 1812. During this conflict, Dayton served as an embarkation point for American attacks on Canada and on British troops in the northwestern part of the United States. Both during and following the war, factories and mills quickly came into being, including a tobacco factory, textile mills, and several other establishments. Dayton boasted two banks by the 1810s as well. With the completion of the Miami and Erie Canal line in 1829 connecting Dayton to Cincinnati, the town continued to thrive. In addition, nine turnpikes connected Dayton to other areas of the state. By the 1840s, Dayton was one of the largest and wealthiest communities in Ohio.

Dayton was heavily involved in Ohio's early industrialization. By the late 1800s, the community had become a center of industry in Ohio. Many of Dayton's other industries were related to agriculture, including mills and numerous companies manufacturing farm implements. Among the best known in the nineteenth century was the Buckeye Mower and Reaper Company. In the 1880s, John Patterson opened the National Cash Register Company in Dayton. Because of the community's industries, workers began organizing in the 1800s as well. One of the first labor organizations in Ohio, the Mechanics' Association, was founded in 1813, and over the next century a number of labor unions organized.

Dayton was also a center for the newspaper and journal publishing industry in Ohio. Many of these publications dealt with either religious issues or agricultural interests. Some examples include Christian World, Young Catholic Messenger, Ohio Bible Teacher, as well as Farmer's Home, the Ohio Swine Journal, and the Ohio Poultry Journal. There were also German newspapers for the town's German settlers. The most famous literary figure from Dayton was Paul Laurence Dunbar. Widely acclaimed as the poet laureate of African Americans, Dunbar penned numerous novels and books of poetry in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The Ohio Historical Society currently maintains Dunbar's final home in Dayton as a state memorial.

In the twentieth century, Dayton continued to prosper. In the first decade, the city became known as the home of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who made the first successful airplane flight. The Flood of 1913, which created significant loss of life and property in Dayton, temporarily halted the city's growth, but the people of Dayton quickly rebounded.

During the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dayton became a center of political reform. Rejecting the control of corrupt city bosses who manipulated politics to serve their own interests, Dayton became the first larger city in the nation to do replace elected mayors with hired professional managers to run the city. Dayton residents believed that the possibility of being fired by the city council created an incentive for the city managers to perform their duties honestly.

In the 1920s, Dayton became a center of Ku Klux Klan activity in the state. Like other industrial cities such as Akron, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic feelings in Dayton fueled Ku Klux Klan membership during that decade.

Dayton benefited economically from the growth of wartime industries during World War II, receiving approximately $1.7 billion in government defense contracts during the war. The city's economy has remained strong in the decades following the Second World War, despite a decline in many of its traditional industries.

In recent years, Dayton was most famous as the site of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. With the United States' support, the Serbs and Bosnians negotiated a peace settlement at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that led to a decline of ethnic violence in Bosnia.