On September 3, 1925, the giant Navy airship USS Shenandoah crashed near this site during a six-day publicity tour across the Midwest after turbulent late-summer weather created strong winds that ripped the 680-feet-long airship in two and tore the control car from the keel. Most of the 14 crewmen who died, including the captain, Lt. Commander Zachary Lansdowne of Greenville, Ohio, were killed when the control car plunged to the ground, while the stern section fell in a valley near Ava and the bow was carried southwest nearly twelve miles before landing near Sharon, Ohio. The Ohio National Guard was called in to control crowds of spectators who traveled to the crash sites. Launched in 1923, USS Shenandoah was America's first rigid dirigible and the first rigid dirigible in the world to use nonflammable helium instead of hydrogen, reflecting efforts to improve the safety of airships as worldwide enthusiasm for lighter-than-air flight peaked in the early 1920s. One year after her initial flight, Shenandoah successfully crossed the United States and logged 235 hours of flight time, but after the loss of Shenandoah and the American airships Akron and Macon, the future of rigid dirigibles grew uncertain, and the 1937 crash of Germany's Hindenburg abruptly ended the era of the great airships.