This week I enjoyed getting the opportunity to be a speaker at a community event hosted by Sinclair, the Appalachian Outreach Community Breakfast.
Although I haven’t conducted a significant amount of research specifically on the Appalachian community in Dayton, the group has come up as a strong theme in much of the history I have dug into.
Specifically, I’m fascinated by Dayton’s role and status as an industrial power during the years when the Appalachian migration intensified and thousands came to work at factories like NCR, Delco, Frigidaire, and more.
For this talk I also did some investigation into the parts of town that many of the Appalachian migrants settled, which has come up in my previous research on urban renewal. The inner-city neighborhoods historically have gotten a lot of the attention, but many were settling in the region’s growing suburbs too.
Understanding this migration helps clarify how Dayton’s industrial success and later redevelopment efforts intersected with questions of class, culture, and neighborhood identity.
For the talk, there was a great group that came even with the 8am start time during a relatively cold winter day! Many were colleagues of mine at Sinclair but some attendees even traveled up from the Cincinnati area to join the breakfast. Several also added some great comments to the discussion afterward, sharing stories of personal memories and family members who worked at these very companies.
And the final thing that made it a great morning was that the breakfast was delicious!
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