Estate sale box may be Wright relic
At first glance, the wooden box was unremarkable.
It was full of paint cans when he saw it at a New Jersey estate sale, but what caught Joe Porus’ eye was the writing on the side: “Wright Aeronautical Corp., Paterson, N.J., U.S.A.”
“I had just gotten my pilot license at the time, so anything about the Wright brothers was interesting to me,” said Porus, of Oakland, N.J. “The woman at the estate sale said her late husband had brought the box home from his job at Curtiss-Wright in Paterson.”
Paterson is about 10 miles southeast of Oakland, which is in Bergen County.
Wright Aeronautical was the name given to the plane company owned by Wilbur and Orville Wright — the brothers credited with the first sustained aircraft flight off Kitty Hawk, N.C. — after it was sold and moved to New Jersey in the early 1900s.
Curtiss-Wright was the plane company formed when Wright Aeronautical was bought by a competitor in 1929.
After buying the box for $5, Porus didn’t think much more about it. For 28 years, he said, it sat in his study holding his flight manuals.
But then in May, he was surprised to find a similar box next to a model of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane during a visit to the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Ohio.
“The box was described as a tool box owned by Wilbur Wright,” Porus said.
Porus was even more surprised when he described his box with printing on the side to a museum employee.
“He said to me very slowly, three times, ‘It’s priceless,’ ” Porus said.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington and the Paterson (N.J.) Museum both reviewed photos of the box, and have tentatively confirmed that it was used by the company to ship tool parts. It is possibly the sole survivor from the factory.
While the museum representatives caution they would have to see the box firsthand to officially confirm its authenticity, neither expressed any doubt of its value.
“We have no photos of that particular box, but we have photos of other boxes used for parts and it is similar,” said Jeremy Kinney, curator of aviation for the Air & Space Museum. “The typeface of the print is true to the period. It’s amazing that something like that survived. Things like that were usually fuel fodder and ended up in the furnace.”