The Wright Brothers & Kitty Hawk

The town of Kitty Hawk will forever be associated with the Wright Brothers and the first successful powered flight. The site of that event is enshrined at the Wright Brothers Monument in Kill Devil Hills, but when Wilbur and Orville first arrived on the Outer Banks in 1900, everything north of Nags Head to Albemarle Sound was called Kitty Hawk.

The brothers were meticulous in their research and data supplied to them showed one of the places with the consistent winds they were looking for was Kitty Hawk.

A letter to the Kitty Hawk Post Office got a response from Assistant Postmaster Bill Tate. His wife, Addie, was the Postmistress.

In his letter Tate assured the brother that the winds were, in fact, steady and further extolled the virtues of the area writing, “This strip of beach is about 1500 yards wide from ocean to the bay, and extends many miles down the coast… at certain places, sand hills have been piled up by the wind until some of them (the Kill Devil Hill) have reached an elevation of 75 to 100 feet above the plain.”

He concluded his letter saying, “I assure you, you will find a hospitable people when you come among us."

Taking Tate at his word, Wilbur showed up on the Tates’ doorstep unannounced in September of 1900. Orville soon followed.

The Tate’s house no longer stands, but there is a marker on Moor Shore Road where the brothers spent their first visit to the Outer Banks.

It soon became apparent that the best conditions for their experiments were at Kill Devil Hill, a large sand dune about four miles south of the Tate’s home. The brothers moved their operation there, establishing a permanent camp site in 1901.