At dawn on September 3, 1925, the Navy airship Shenandoah was caught in a violent storm and crashed 7 miles southwest of this spot near Ava after its last words, “Wind increasing in volume. Get no chance to....” 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, and smaller blimps replaced the dirigible as America's lighter-than-air sentinels of the sky.