The Wright Brothers invented airplanes, right? But should credit go to this Sutter County native?

To this day, some people will look you in the eye and tell you Sutter County native John Joseph Montgomery, who died more than a century ago, is, and always has been, the true father of flight.

But aviation history, and the personal motivations of the people who shaped it, with all the insights and recriminations — still hasn’t agreed on a place for Montgomery, the subject of some books and a footnote in others.

Some still defend his influence on aviation, a claim that displaces the importance of the Wright brothers and fundamentally challenges the early history of aeronautics. Others believe he belongs as a background character in humanity’s quest to soar.

The argument in favor of Montgomery begins with his early glided flights, made with an invention he designed and built, being the first controlled glided flights. The qualifier of control is important, as it’s what would distinguish Montgomery who is, depending who you ask, the forgotten genius from a generation of his peers. He was among those in different parts of the country and world experimenting with how to control an aircraft through the sky.

That qualifier is also important because it’s what distinguishes Montgomery from the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, who are credited with the first powered, controlled flight (in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903).

“You’ve got those who are intellectual plagiarists and you have original thinkers,” said Gill Wright, a California Pilots Association board member and Montgomery supporter. “And that’s what we’re dealing with here, with who and what John Montgomery was.”

However, the history of science and innovation is matched by one of marketing and, some say, propaganda, leaving an evolving narrative and conflicting claims of winners and losers in the race to fly.

Just as some say Montgomery taught the world to fly, many would just as readily leave him in the margins of history. In either case, you’d be hard pressed to find any sign or remembrance of him in Sutter County, despite recognition elsewhere in the country and state, leaving the question of where that leaves him in the eyes of his own hometown.

The case for Montgomery

The legend of Montgomery often begins with a tale of the young boy first dreaming of flight, looking to the tops of the Sutter Buttes where he imagined himself reaching for the clouds and gliding from the peak of what’s known as the world’s smallest mountain range.

Born in 1858 to a frontier family in Yuba City, at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers, Montgomery took a keen interest in birds at a young age, benefiting from his proximity to the Pacific Flyway. The evolution of that early interest later informed his interest in the physics of flight and the significance of the curvature of a plane’s wings, both of which are key components in the case defending his accomplishments.

When he was 6, his family moved from Sutter County to the Bay Area, where he became a wunderkind of sorts, earning a master’s degree at 22 and later becoming a professor at Santa Clara College.

But his seminal achievement came in 1884 when he launched a glider he had designed and built from a hill outside of San Diego, controlling the motion of the wings to guide its path for up to 600 feet, according to some historical accounts.

People had flown gliders prior to that, but it’s the element of control that separated Montgomery’s flight. This is key to his proponents who say that Montgomery was the first to understand and demonstrate the physics that inform controlled flight to this day.

However, those less impressed by Montgomery point to a lack of firsthand evidence of his first controlled glide, and to an evolving narrative in which the date and distance of the flight changed before finally becoming consistent.

It’s not that he invented the airplane as we know it today. Rather, his supporters say that Montgomery was the first to understand and demonstrate the physics and control that still informs modern flight.

Pushing to remember

Thom Taylor is a Montgomery proponent. He learned of Montgomery, as fate would have it, after taking an interest in the Wright brothers.

A woodworker, Taylor set out to build a replica of a glider the Wright brothers created in the early 1900s. That took him more than a year. He had not even heard of Montgomery until after he completed that project more than 10 years ago, and that sparked his quest to learn all he could about the Northern California aviator and affirm his place in history.

“He did a lot more than anybody would really think and he’s not credited for half the things that were possible or ideas that eventually came out,” Taylor said.

Taylor met Gill Wright (who is not related to the Wright Brothers) through a local chapter of Experimental Aviation Association while embarking on his next project: a replica of “The Santa Clara,” a glider Montgomery made famous. Wright was unaware of Montgomery, but remembered seeing the glider design and becoming fascinated by the technology.

“When I looked at where the stirrups were and all of the different control surfaces, I went, ‘This would be like kayaking in the air,’” Wright said.

The two have shared a mutual interest in Montgomery ever since, crediting Sutter County’s own with independently reaching scientific conclusions and flight designs that still resonate in modern flight.

“A lot of physics for him to figure out because no one was there,” Wright said. “He did it all on his own in isolation here in California.”

But there are some even in California who remain less convinced of Montgomery’s importance.

Competing narratives

Allen Herr remembered being in Paris and walking into the National Air and Space Museum of France at Le Bourget Airport. He saw a large photograph of Montgomery, displayed prominently across a wall, with a historical narrative imposed onto it.

“I couldn’t read it because I don’t read French,” Herr said. “But I’m thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, they fooled ‘em again.’”

Whether the French were duped depends on which interpretation of Montgomery’s place in aviation history they endorse. Herr’s skepticism is grounded in what he described as a lack of firsthand evidence of Montgomery’s feats, particularly his claim of making a controlled glide in 1884 outside of San Diego near the Mexican border.

“Let’s put it this way, no one will ever know,” Herr said. “He’ll be justified to history right after Amelia Earhart’s found.”

Although Montgomery’s brother was there for the first controlled glide, some historians point to changing details of accounts of that flight and lack of documented evidence when questioning where to place it among other “firsts” in aviation.

Like Montgomery, Herr was born in the Yuba-Sutter area with dreams of flying. Herr grew up with a love of flight picked up from his father and has been a pilot since he was 18. He’s written three books on Northern California aviation history in which Montgomery’s name seldom appears.

As someone who essentially shares Montgomery’s hometown and passion for flight, Herr has as much reason as anyone to buy into Montgomery’s importance, yet he doesn’t.

“I think he’s gotten plenty of credit for what he’s done, and I’m not sure that he’s really contributed anything to aviation history,” Herr said.

Evolving flight

Montgomery’s interest in flight evolved beyond the initial controlled glide, eventually leading him to build more flying machines, including ones released from hot air balloons high in the sky, that he trained men to maneuver and land.

“He came up with a hairbrained scheme of how to get it up into the air, which was actually ingenious but was also extremely dangerous,” Herr said.

High-flying spectacles had become popular, despite their dangers. People would float high on hot air balloons and parachute down, among other acrobatic feats.

Montgomery combined his early control technology and understanding of aerodynamics to create the gliders, carried high on hot air balloons and released into the sky. They soared with control from heights of about 4,000 feet and successfully landed.

Daniel J. Maloney guided Montgomery’s “The Santa Clara” in 1905, according to some historians, to become the first widely seen demonstration of a heavier-than-air craft in the U.S.

However, the dangers of early flight experiments persisted. Maloney was later killed after crashing the same glider. Montgomery died several years later in 1911 at 53 years old from a wreck of his latest machine at the time, “The Evergreen.”

Although the battle over his work began before his death, it continued long after.

Wright brothers and anti-West Coast bias

Montgomery supporters, such as Taylor and Wright, and skeptics, such as Herr, agree West Coast bias affected Montgomery and other innovators of that time.

During those days, the country’s intellectual and scientific communities were largely based on the East Coast while California remained the Wild West as far as some were concerned.

Some books written in the past decade or so make a case for Montgomery’s contributions to aviation, which they argue benefited the Wright brothers experiments with plane construction, and detail an ongoing campaign led by Orville Wright to discredit Montgomery.

“They had powered flight, but they didn’t understand controlled powered flight,” Gill Wright said of the Wright brothers. “They were still struggling with the basic principles of lift, power and drag. Pitch, yaw and roll.”

The efforts against Montgomery predate his death and continued for decades, including attempts to block the release of “Gallant Journey,” a 1946 film starring Glenn Ford about Montgomery. Even receiving a patent for his “aeroplane” in 1906 led to years of subsequent legal battles.

“That’s why he got a bad reputation,” Taylor said. “To this day, if you ask a young person who invented the airplane, they’ll yell out Wright brothers. “And that’s very far from the truth.”

Herr, too, said he’s never been a fan of the Wright brothers, but they had witnesses, photographs and documentation to corroborate their “firsts.”

“If it was a matter of being liked, the Wrights would have never gotten a patent,” Herr said. “Because people hated the Wrights.”

Dueling accounts exist of Montgomery’s time at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where he crossed paths with brilliant minds in the field of science. Innovation was rampant and technology was rapidly advancing throughout the world.

Bias permeates history. Where one interpretation of Montgomery exists, so does another.

Favorable accounts of Montgomery use descriptors such as “genius” and “prodigy” while those arguing against his significance at times emphasize his early balding and the distinct manner of his gait.

Of course, even geniuses err and baldness doesn’t preclude brilliance. Those details amount to an author nudging depiction of a misunderstood wunderkind versus an aloof outsider.

The opinions on Montgomery have been decidedly mixed. But what’s kept him from recognition in his hometown?

Interpretation and local history

Local pride inspires local research on local history.

That’s a point Molly Bloom, Sutter County Museum director, raises when explaining how some pieces of local history rise above others. At some point, judgments are made on where a person stands in history. The lines separating levels of importance often blur.

“Not talking about them, not thinking about them, not sharing their stories can decrease their importance,” she said. “I think it all really depends on people championing people’s stories.”

Montgomery’s name found recognition gradually through time. The National Society of Aerospace Professionals in 1962 created the John J. Montgomery award and the National Aviation Hall of Fame — in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright brothers — inducted Montgomery in 1964. He was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2017.

Montgomery’s name has come up in the realms of the Sutter County museum over the past few years. About a year ago, the museum’s quarterly publication ran a piece extolling the unheralded virtues of Montgomery, written by Chuck Smith, a local history keeper. Not long after that piece ran, Wright approached the museum about potentially recognizing Montgomery within its walls.

But even a temporary exhibit can take a long time to come together and go on display. Plans for a Montgomery display, as of now, are not imminent but remain possible.

“With someone like Montgomery I think it is important to have the perspectives of people who think he was overlooked, of people who think he was perhaps accurately represented, and then letting your viewer at the museum come to their own conclusions,” Bloom said.

Obscurity, counterintuitively, can amplify a person’s legacy. A sense of being unknown can increase a person’s importance to the ones who see them as others don’t, while creating mystique to the uninitiated. In turn, that may create an outsize interpretation of that person’s story, or at least a discrepancy between their contribution to history under a microscope versus within the context of the history it shares.

Whether that’s been the case for Montgomery is hard to say. Montgomery’s place in history rests on his contributions to controlled flight, yet few can control how the world will perceive them, in life or in death.

For now, his status among famous aviators remains liable to change, and impossible to control.