Montgomery County Historical Society
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Montgomery County Historical Society is designated as official historian of Montgomery County, Ohio and Miami Valley heritage.
In 1896, a group of citizens gathered at the Old Court House in Dayton, Ohio to create an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the history of the Miami Valley. Their goal was to celebrate the city’s centennial by saving and converting Newcom’s Tavern, Dayton’s oldest building (ca. 1796), into the community’s first history museum. They called their organization the Dayton Historical Society.
The society remained headquartered in Newcom’s Tavern for seventy-five years. In 1968, the society’s volunteers took a leadership role in the preservation of another outstanding community landmark, the 1850 Montgomery County courthouse, the nation’s best surviving example of a Greek Revival style courthouse. Citizen Horace Pease of Dayton who had in his personal library a book of sketches of the Acropolis in Athens, which showed the Temple of Theseus, which he admired. Pease showed it to the Montgomery County Commissioners, who also were favorably impressed, and agreed it would be a good model for the new Courthouse. They hired architect Howard Daniels of New York to draw the plans in which he captured the form and beauty of the ancient Greek temple. The building restored and well maintained, stands as a tribute to the leaders of old Dayton and to the artisans of the Miami Valley who built it. . The Dayton Historical Society became The Montgomery County Historical Society and relocated to the Old Court House. Newcom's Tavern is now located on the grounds of the Carillon Historical Park.
In 1977, the City of Dayton asked the society to provide management and museum services for the Patterson Homestead, home of the prominent Patterson family and birthplace of John H. Patterson. Today, the Patterson Homestead is a site for educational programming on life in early Dayton.
In 1998, the society began management of the NCR Archive, a collection of over three million historic objects of local, national and international significance, making the society one of the largest historical organizations in the Midwest. The new Miami Valley History Research Center, featuring the NCR Archive, opened for public tours in 2001.
In 2005, Carillon Historical Park and the Montgomery County Historical Society merged to form Dayton History.
