Grover Bergdoll’s Wright B Flyer airplane

In April 2023, the prestigious Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia reversed its 90-year declaration that the one-of-a-kind Bergdoll Wright B Flyer airplane on display in the museum since 1935 had been given to the museum through a third party and in a written agreement from the airplane’s owner, Grover Cleveland Bergdoll.

Now, the museum claims, the most original Wright Brothers airplane existing today was given to the museum in an oral agreement, for which the museum has no documentation, oral or written from Bergdoll while he was hiding in Germany as a federal fugitive from American justice, as the nation’s most notorious draft dodger. This new and undocumented explanation for the Bergdoll airplane acquisition places the museum in a quandary along with many museums around the world facing reconciliation over past acquisitions that would not meet today’s ethical standards.

The Bergdoll 1911 Wright B Flyer was purchased from Orville Wright by Grover Bergdoll after Bergdoll completed the Wright Brothers pilot training course at its Ohio Huffman Prairie airfield in the spring of 1912. The purchase price was $5 thousand, about $157 thousand today. Bergdoll shipped the biplane to his home in Philadelphia and flew it on 748 flights without a mishap, including record-setting flights from Philadelphia to Atlantic City in 1912 and 1913.

Mothballing the airplane in his brother’s machine shop along West Chester Pike near Philadelphia and their country estate farm complex in Broomall, Pennsylvania, Bergdoll let the airplane rot to the elements and engine thieves while he was hiding in Germany as America’s Most Notorious Millionaire Draft Dodger from 1920 - 1939. In Germany, Bergdoll chose to remain incommunicado with Americans. Bounty hunters tried in deadly vain to capture him and return him to America for trial for escaping his Army guards. To gain freedom after conviction for draft dodging, he bribed lawyers and politicians all the way up to the White House to travel on a ruse of a story about retrieving hidden gold in the Maryland mountains.

Removed from the Bergdoll property in 1933, the classic Wright Brothers airplane was restored and flown twice in 1934 and then installed as an exhibit in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The museum has presented, since 1935, that Bergdoll, himself, gave the airplane to museum volunteer, William Sheahan, who then gave the airplane to the museum. Franklin Institute records claim that Bergdoll presented the airplane to Sheahan in “letters” and that Sheahan turned the airplane over to the museum for its Hall of Aviation, organized in the early 1930s.

Pressed to produce the “letters” for documentation of the Bergdoll airplane gift, the museum spent seven years searching its records for a written document by Bergdoll gifting the airplane to the museum. Finally, the museum reported, that no record of a written gift by Bergdoll or anyone else presenting the airplane to Sheahan has been found.

Instead, the museum in April 2023, reversed course, and reported through its curator, that the 1933 Bergdoll airplane gift was not in writing, but, rather, an oral declaration to present the airplane to the museum. How the airplane was gifted to Sheahan or the museum orally by Bergdoll, who was hiding from everyone, more than four thousand miles away in Germany, has not been presented. And how the museum could change course after 90 years and declare an oral gift of the airplane, without documentation, is unknown.

The Franklin Institute has been a wonderful steward of the Bergdoll airplane since it was installed in the museum’s Hall of Aviation in early 1935. It has restored the airplane three times and properly maintained it as more original than the Wright Brothers 1903 Kitty Hawk flyer at the Smithsonian Institution. However, since it gained possession of the Bergdoll airplane in 1933, it has mostly represented the airplane as a Wright Brothers vessel with scant mention of the Bergdolls. This part of the airplane’s history should be publicized with credit to the Bergdolls for their contribution to aviation history in America.

Additionally, because the Franklin Institute cannot verify its long-presented gifting story of the Bergdoll airplane as being in writing by Grover Bergdoll, it should immediately open a dialogue with the Bergdoll family and the public and make new declarations about its acquisition of the priceless relic.

The long-maligned Bergdolls are owed this thoughtfulness, at least, and an explanation to them and the public that the airplane’s acquisition was not made in 1933 as the museum has presented all these years and as it would have been under today’s ethical standards for museums.