History Lesson 
Two Wings and a Prayer
One hundred years ago, in the tiny East Texas town of Pittsburg, the Reverend Burrell Cannon interpreted apocalyptic words in the Bible as instructions to build a flying machine. And he succeeded, sort of. Are the history books wrong about who was first in flight?
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But all was not well in the machine shop or the corporation. Expectations had been running high, but Cannon kept pushing the completion date back. Impatient investors, discouraged by the delays, began withholding money. Worksheets show that Cannon toiled on the airship at the machine shop through October 1902, but by the time of the Stamps test flight late that year, the reverend was running his operation on a shoestring. According to Stamps's later account, the reason the airship had vibrated so violently, causing him to turn the engine off, was because Cannon was forced to use a flimsy sawmill dust-cleaning chain to drive the wheels instead of something sturdier and more expensive.
By the end of 1902, Cannon was broke, and no one was eager to help him. Davis says it was a matter of undelivered goods: "He hadn't produced what he'd promised: an airship capable of flying and carrying a payload. The stockholders refused to give him any more money and wanted nothing more to do with him." It wasn't just investors, either. The Gazette, which had been such a booster, stopped writing about the airship. "I think they were sick of him," says a local amateur historian, John Holman, who has compiled a book on the airship. "And I think he was sick of them." A few months later, Cannon moved back to Pine, taking his airship with him. No one was terribly surprised to see him go.
Spurned by Pittsburg, Cannon loaded the Ezekiel onto a railroad flatcar and headed north. He was hitting the road to preach the gospel and pass the hat, and eventually, some said, he was going to St. Louis for the upcoming World's Fair, where a reward of $100,000 was going to be offered for anyone who made a sustained controlled flight. But somewhere near Texarkana, in the Red River Bottoms, a windstorm as big and fiery as anything in Ezekiel blew the airship off the flatcar and into the ground, destroying it. He left the remains where they lay.
Ever the optimist, Cannon never looked back. Soon after the train disaster, he wrote to Lillie and told her that he was trying to reorganize the corporation: "There is a chance of success yet, if I can get clear of that wrangling Pittsburg crowd who wanted everything yet had no money to keep their agreement with me." And for the next eight years, long after the race was over and the Wright brothers had won, Cannon kept his strange dream alive. He built a second airship in 1911, creating another corporation back in Longview and selling more stock. Details are even sketchier about this version, but apparently it ran into a telephone pole on a test flight and was destroyed. Cannon abandoned the Ezekiel, this time for good.
In his final years Cannon was a flat-broke widower, living with his stepdaughter's family in Longview. Still, he kept inventing: an Apparatus for Automatically Photographing Persons Moving Along a Confined Way and a cotton harvester. In 1922 a fire destroyed all his plans and drawings for the Ezekiel Airship. He died later that year.
FOR THE REST OF THE CENTURY in Pittsburg, the Ezekiel story was treated as a sort of rural myth. There had been other witnesses to Stamps's flight, and they told the story, often to unbelieving ears. Residents Aubrey Swaim and his brother Parvin, who were small boys in 1902, told of watching the airship fly uncertainly toward a fence on which some other boys were sitting and how they scrambled to get away. Olive Coley, a young girl at the time, recounted how the airship had been tied with rope to the ground, and one of the holders had gotten tangled up in the rope and been pulled into the sky. And high school teacher Nina Berry made the Ezekiel her own personal history lesson for the town's children, telling the story every year. Cannon's local descendants spoke of the reverend as though he were a hero, and his granddaughter Lenita Tacea said her mother claimed that Cannon had actually been there on the day of the Stamps flight and that he had given the pilot instructions, but the airship had been too heavy and had hit a fence and stopped after going 167 feet (she said Cannon had measured the distance). Tacea also said the reason Cannon hadn't flown it himself was because, at six feet four and two hundred pounds, he was too big.
More than half a century after Cannon's death, in 1975, the Camp County Historical Committee asked member Lacy Davis to help prove the airship's existence so the Texas Historical Commission would give Pittsburg a historical marker. In addition to the oral histories, Davis found the machine-shop worksheets that showed work being done on the airship in 1902. The collected evidence was enough to earn the town its marker, which in 1977 was placed beside the meadow. It said the airship had been "briefly airborne at this site late in 1902."
Was it? If only there were a newspaper account, or better yet, a picture of the airship in flight. One photo does exist, but it's of an earlier version of the final model, at rest. There are some questions of logic as well. Why, for example, didn't the other men present at the test flight ever tell their versions of the story? And if the machine did fly, why were its backers so eager to pull out? These missing pieces leave the airship story with plenty of skeptics. Many believe, just as observers noted back in 1902, that the engine was too heavy for flight. Then there are the paddles. According to James Loewen, a gadfly pop-historian and the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me as well as a Web page called the Top Ten Silliest Historical Sites in America (the Ezekiel is at number three; uvm.edu/~jloewen/), the paddles would have negated any forward and upward motion every time they completed a circle. "The Ezekiel Airship never got off the ground," he writes, matter-of-factly. Former General Dynamics aerospace engineer Robert Turner says Cannon took into consideration the negative lift factor by making the inner wheel "eccentrically located" so the paddles would pivot and not fully push air on the way back up, like the way a swimmer doing the crawl brings his cupped hands back to his body. Turner, who sits on the Camp County Museum Association board, allows that the wheel would have had to have been a well-made piece of machinery to accomplish this. I asked if he thought Cannon pulled it off. "I don't know," he says. "I worked in aerodynamics for years, and I found that the final product usually does not work as well as the theory originally said it would. The Ezekiel is problematical in my mind. But he did have witnesses."
None of the firsthand witnesses are still alive, and eighty-year-old Jean Locke is the last surviving secondhand witness. When I asked her how many times she's told the story that her mother told her, she laughed and said, "Oh, dear Gussie, I don't know." Her mother, Elizabeth Merrell, was thirteen and walking with her friend Agnes on a Sunday afternoon alongside the pasture when they heard a noise and looked up. "It came up above the fencerow," Locke told me, "and they saw it up in the air. She didn't know how high it was. It was just up in the air." Locke doesn't dress up the story. Her mother saw it in the air, and that's that. "If she said she saw it, she saw it."
WHATEVER THE TRUTH, THE HISTORICAL marker revived interest among Pittsburg citizens over the airship. In the mid-eighties Bob Loughery, a local building contractor and mechanic, built a replica for the Pittsburg Optimist Club, using Cannon's windwheel patent application and the only existing photo. The replica sat in a local restaurant until 1998, when it was moved to the Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum, where it hangs today. In 2000 the Texas Department of Transportation gave the museum a grant of $169,000 to build an addition that will give the airship a permanent home. Everyone in Pittsburg is thrilled about the tourism possibilities; what was once considered a bust is now an official part of the town logo. "We don't want to take anything away from the Wright brothers," said John Holman, when I went to see the airship at the preliminary museum opening in October. "We just want Reverend Cannon to be recognized as an early aviation pioneer." Davis agreed, and he told me what he and most here believe—the airship got off the ground, moved through the air and landed, but there was no control. It was flight but not controlled flight. Another old-timer was a little more candid, telling me, "Well, you can throw a rock and it'll fly for a little while."
Still, who hasn't dreamed of flying, even if for only a few seconds? Walking into the museum and looking up in wonder at the replica, suspended in flight, it's easy to recall that dream. Cannon's reach exceeded his grasp—by an inch or by a mile, it doesn't matter. What's a heaven for?
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