North Carolina's coin, to be minted one year earlier, will feature the plane's historic 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk on the state's Outer Banks. The U.S. Mint's popular new quarters are intended to honor each state's identity. Georgia has its peaches, Maryland has a Revolutionary War Minuteman and New Jersey has Washington crossing the Delaware. The new quarters come at a time when Ohio and North Carolina tourism groups are planning different celebra tions of the first flight's 2003 centennial. A lot more than bragging rights is at stake here.
Tourism equates to dollars and jobs, and North Carolina gets more out of the Wrights than Ohio.
National Park Service statistics show more than 377,000 people visited the Wright Brothers site at Kitty Hawk in 1999. Only about 33,700 people visited four Wright sites the Park Service is developing in Dayton. Those sites include the brothers' restored bicycle shop, one of their airplanes and a field used for test flights. Madeline Iseli, director of Dayton's Inventing Flight organization, hopes to draw more visitors to Dayton's sites once they are fully developed in 2003. She thinks Ohio's quarter could help.