As wind increased in volume, the doomed Navy airship Shenandoah sent its last words before it was caught in a violent storm and crashed seven miles southwest of this spot near Ava at dawn on September 3, 1925. Fourteen of its crew were killed. As souvenir hunters stripped the wreckage, the nation questioned the value of huge, rigid dirigibles, the last of which crashed in 1935. Smaller blimps replaced the dirigible as America’s lighter-than-air sentinels of the sky.