Over the past several years, as I’ve researched Dayton’s industrial history and the neighborhoods that once surrounded its factories, one theme has come up repeatedly: Appalachian migration.
Between the late 1930s and 1960s, tens of thousands of people from eastern Kentucky and surrounding regions came to Dayton in search of work.
Their story is deeply connected to Dayton’s manufacturing boom, and to the neighborhoods that shaped the city during its peak industrial decades, and the urban renewal projects that came as regional patterns shifted and those companies began to struggle…