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is a city in and the county seat of Montgomery County, Ohio, United States, in the southwestern part of the state. The population was 166,179 at the 2000 census. The Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Montgomery, Miami, Greene, and Preble counties, had a population of 835,535 in 2007. Dayton is the fourth largest metropolitan area in Ohio and the third fastest growing metropolitan area in the Midwest. The Dayton-Springfield-Greenville Combined Statistical Area had a population of 1,085,094 in 2000. Dayton is situated within the Miami Valley region of Ohio, just north of the Cincinnati metropolitan area.
Dayton plays host to significant industrial, aerospace, and technological/engineering research activity and is known for the many technical innovations and inventions developed there. Much of this innovation is due in part to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its place within the community. The city was the home of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought an end to the war in Bosnia. Orville Wright, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and entrepreneur John H. Patterson were born in Dayton.
Dayton was founded on April 1, 1796 by a small group of US settlers seven years before the admission of Ohio to the Union in 1803. The town was incorporated in 1805 and given its name after Jonathan Dayton, a captain in the American Revolutionary War and signatory of the U.S. Constitution.
In 1797, Daniel C. Cooper laid out the Mad River Road, the first overland connection between Cincinnati, Ohio and Dayton. This opened up the "Mad River Country" at Dayton and the upper Miami Valley to settlement.
The Miami and Erie Canal, built in the 1830s, connected the Dayton commerce from Lake Erie via the Great Miami River and served as the principal route of transportation for western Ohio until the 1850s.
The catastrophic Great Dayton Flood of March 1913 severely affected much of the city, stimulated the growth of suburban communities outside central Dayton in areas lying further from the Miami River and on higher ground, and led to the establishment of the Miami Conservancy District in 1914. The flood remains an event of note in popular memory and local histories. The high waters damaged some of the Wright Brothers' glass plate photographic negatives of their glider flights at Kitty Hawk and power flights over Huffman Prairie near Dayton.
On November 29, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech to more than 6,200 people at the UD Fieldhouse (now called Thomas J. Frericks Center) on the University of Dayton campus. A reel-to-reel recording of this speech was discovered at the University of Dayton. The audio recording was discovered in January 2009 by filmmaker David Schock of Grand Haven, Michigan. He found the unlabeled tape in a box of recordings.