Looking Back…

The Year is…1909

Were Emmitsburg Residents Pioneers in Aviation?

by James Rada, Jr.

On Friday morning, December 24, 1909, residents of Adams County looked up and saw something flying overhead in a northeasterly direction.

“They say the machine was flying high and fast and that it had a tail. Some thought it was a baloon (sic) but the tail mentioned indicates an airship,” The Gettysburg Times reported.

Although the Wright Brothers had successfully flown the first heavier-than-air powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, six years earlier, airplanes were still an uncommon sight. This airplane may have been a 1909 Wright military flyer, which was used to train U.S. Army aviators at College Park that year.

People had seen something, though. Reports came in from Emmitsburg, Gettysburg, Arendtsville, and Bonneauville of the flying machine. Workers on the Western Maryland Railroad reported that they had seen the airship. William H. Sharretts said that he had seen the plane on the way to school in Bonneauville and had followed it for two miles before it got too far away from him.

The Emmitsburg Chronicle then added to the confusion with a joking article that began “Discovered at last! Curses!” Editor Sterling Galt wrote the article identifying the mysterious airship.

“The truth is that the object that flew over Gettysburg on Friday was an airship, built, owned and navigated by Prof. Dan Shorb and Dr. ‘Bill’ Snyder, of the University of Harney. These men of science who had been working on Dr. Crook’s solar records for two months eleven and one-half days and a few nights completed their calculations and started on their airship journey from Poplar Ridge last Friday at 1 A. X.,” Galt wrote.

Shorb and Snyder were not professors, and there was no University of Harney, but this was probably just as good an explanation as any.

“The expedition proceeded in a northerly course, but on reaching an altitude of 88 1-4 miles the clobhaggle on the hakiscope got tangled up with Dr. Snyder’s memory, throwing the machine off about twenty-three points to the Eastward,” Galt wrote.

Galt added that the plane’s destination was Gogenhaben.

Although it wasn’t ever confirmed in a non-satirical manner, Shorb and Snyder were actual people, so they may have created an airship of some sort. It is unlikely, though.

Shorb and Snyder pop up fairly often in the Emmitsburg Chronicle and usually in humorous ways. Besides being credited for inventing an airship, they also invented a rapid-fire noodle-soup gun and discovered new species of chickens and fish, among others.

So, does that make this incident the first report of an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Adams County? And, did Emmitsburg play a role in early aviation history?

An Arendtsville resident wrote to The Gettysburg Times, “It will not be many years till the sky will be so full of airships that they will darken the sun. Everybody will ride in an airship and the steam passenger cars will be abandoned.”

Air flight finally arrived in Adams County in 1921, when its first airport was built.

Wright Military Flyer