Postwar Fairborn: Early 1950s Gallery

As we've seen Fairborn made the transition to a blue collar Dayton suburb.

Fairborn participated in the early 1950s housing boom by filling in some older plats, like Osborn View and Wright View, and adding new subdivisions.

The following map shows how Fairborn grew by adding new subdivisions on to existing plats and started to extend south, up the hill on Maple Street, as well as a large plat added on to Wright View.

The orange colored ares outlined in bold were all under development by 1955/56, and would have been counted in the 1957 traffic survey.




A quick gallery of early 50's style. This was a transitonal era into ranch houses from the cape cod/english cottage style of the 1940s. Mouse over the images and click for some detail.

These houses are on a plat just north of the intersection of Route 444 and Central Street, and was under development by 1952, so these are some of the earliest postwar houses. One can see the modernist detailing being added to more traditional forms of the 1940s, and some early ranches (the first in Dayton are from the late 1940s).



This next plat was added to the east of the 1940s Krumms Allotment plat east of Maple Avenue, on the northeast side of Fairborn. Again, these examples show some modern detailing like L-plans, band windows, corner windows, prominent fire places as accent features, and horizontal brick half-walls.

The upper right house looks like it come have come from Levittown.

The next houses are south of town on the Osborn View and Pleasant View plats. Again, small houses perhaps built for the industrial workforce, with modernist touches (like the one on the upper left, with the brick wall and stone decorations popping out in a stairstep pattern, and the corner windows, band windows, and low pitch roof emphasising the horizontal).

Most of the houses on the Pleasant View plat east of Maple are very spartan, without much decoration except for what the owner has done.


The lower right house was on a plat just south of Osborn View, built on the hill coming up from the Mad River plain. Note it seems slightly larger. and may have been a bit later than the others we've seen.

And to close, a quick look at honky tonk downtown Fairborn, with its hotels for transient military passing through the base (though the depot was closed there was still military activity going on) and a corner store on the busy Main Street (no strip centers yet).

...plus that old car from the 1940s; probably went down Route 4 to Dayton many a times.

Main Street Fairborn is worth a closer look as a postwar shopping area, but not built as an auto-strip. Lest one think downtown Fairborn is not of much value, Main Street Fairborn was actually investigated by the dean of the Utah State architectural school when she taught at UC as an urban design problem, and her work on Fairborn was published.

Next, though, we'll look at where the base workers ended up after the war; the suburbanization of the Wright-Patterson workforce.