present inundation
have the rivers which flow through it left their accustomed courses and
brought death and destruction of property upon the town. The first of
these floods occurred in 1805, the very year that Dayton was
incorporated as a town. The sixth was in 1898 and the others in the
years 1847, 1863, 1866 and 1886.

The site of the present city was purchased in 1795 by a group of
Revolutionary soldiers and laid out as a town in the following year by
one of them, who named it after Jonathan Dayton, a Jerseyman who had
fought in the Revolution and who later served in Congress and the United
States Senate. It became the county seat of Montgomery County in 1803
and received its city charter in 1841, something more than a score of
years after the opening of the Miami Canal gave a boom to its growth and
prosperity.

[Illustration: Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Crowds at the end of one of the streets which was turned into a racing
river. Many persons floating down on the debris were rescued by willing
hands as they neared this point]

[Illustration: Copyright by George Grantham Bain.
Even before the flood reached its height, the wood-working department of
the National Cash Register Factory was busily putting together
improvised boats that were afterwards of great value in rescuing
marooned residents from their flooded homes]

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Within the city limits the waters of Wolf Creek, Stillwater and Mad
Rivers unite with those of the great Miami. The latter stream flows
through the city from north to south. As it reaches the corporation
limits at the north it sweeps to the westward and is joined by
Stillwater River a mile and a half from the court house. Then it takes
an easterly course for half a mile and is joined by the Mad River at a
point about half a mile from the court house.

The river then bends again to the west for more than half a mile and is
joined by Wolf Creek. Its course lies thereafter to the southeast. Great
bridges, some of them of great architectural beauty, cross all of these
streams. The Miami Canal takes water from the Mad River about two miles
northeast of the court house, runs parallel with the Mad River to its
confluence with the Miami and then runs southward to the city limits.

The city is regularly laid out, the street and house number plan being
arranged with arithmetical exactness. Main Street is the center of this
system and the house numbers begin fr