During the early morning hours of Sept. 3, 1925, a fierce storm tears through the skies of Noble County. The USS Shenandoah is no match for the relentless squall. As the ship falls apart midair, flaming debris rains down over the fields below.
The tragedy results in the death of 14 of 43 airmen. Nearly 100 years later, the crash is still recognized as one of the region’s most jarring and painful events ever recorded.
“I’ve read some stories where the dirigible was tossed around a thousand feet at a time,” Jeff Minosky says, a local historian at the Noble County Historical Society.
The USS Shenandoah was the first of three dirigibles launched in the U.S. It was constructed in the mid-1920s, followed by the USS Akron and the USS Macon. The second two ships crashed within 10 years of the Shenandoah disaster.
At the time, airships were high-tech innovations that were considered the future of military operations and navigational travel.
According to the Naval History and Heritage Command, the vessel measured almost 700 feet long and weighing 77,500 pounds, the airships could reach speeds near 70 miles per hour. The USS Shenandoah was the first of its kind to make a transcontinental flight and the first airship to incorporate helium-based flight instead of highly flammable hydrogen tanks.
Hydrogen would be the downfall of other airships, including the infamous Hindenburg disaster of 1937.
The USS Shenandoah launched on August 20, 1923, as a promotional stunt to travel across the Midwest’s various local and state fairs.
“It would be so foreign to the people here. A lot of them was still private Model T’s and horse and buggies still in Noble County. So, it’d be like the equivalent of the space shuttle crashing in Noble County,” Minosky says.
Two years later and after flying over more than 40 cities, the USS Shenandoah collided with the earth, leaving the surrounding region peppered in rubble and debris for months afterwards.
“There’s basically three crash sites in Noble County … One is a farm, and that’s where the control car crashed. It broke off of the main unit and crashed and killed everybody in the control car. Then the site two, if you come down I 77 South, about the 32-mile marker … The third crash site is out by Sharon. The bow of the ship actually free floated with a few men aboard and a farmer out there. They threw it down a rope to him, and he was able to tie it off,” Minosky says.
Looters raided the crash sites for burnt memorabilia—scraps of the dirigible’s shell, bits of shattered metal and other surviving parts. This practice became illegal once the U.S. Navy stepped in to formally investigate.
The Navy found several release pressure valves had been removed to make the ship more buoyant, although the official cause of the crash was attributed to turbulence.
Today, many family members of the locals who gathered debris from the original site have returned pieces out of respect for history and the victims of the crash.
Several memorial sites have been constructed by the Navy and the families of the deceased across Noble County. A yearly memorial service is held in late August to commemorate the incident. Today, descendants of crew members, victims’ grandchildren and even great-grandchildren pay tribute.
The local high school named after the Shenandoah has its marching band play at the service every year.
As the 100th anniversary of the crash approaches, an area full of new people and new families, all recognize and respect the tragic turn of events that happened on that September day in 1925.
Though time has passed, generations in Noble County remember and pay tribute.