Elkton airship inventor

There’s a mausoleum in Elkton’s cemetery in which Henry Heintz is entombed. Heintz is remembered for his failed attempt to invent an airplane three years before Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous Kitty Hawk flight.

And why he built his cement crypt in the first place.

I’ll get to that later.

Heintz was born in Germany in 1848 and came to America in 1871, settling first in Wisconsin and then homesteaded in Richland Township, Brooking County, in 1879. He served as a state legislator in 1890, became a successful Richland Township farmer and was Elkton’s postmaster more than a century ago.

Three years before the Wright Brothers 1903 Kitty Hawk flight, Heintz was designing and overseeing the construction of his flying machine in Aurora. Of course, he and Aurora blacksmith Frank Wulf had no idea what an airplane should look like.

The Wright brothers patterned their flying machine after a bird. Heintz settled on the rowboat look for his airship. His original drawing and other 1897 U.S. Patent No. 580,941 information is on file in the Brookings County Museum’s Archives. The Heintz airplane and his crypt story were well covered in early county newspapers.

Heintz’s craft was powered by a steam engine.

His flying machine design had a headlight on the stern and a little propeller aft for propulsion. It was tiller steered, like a boat.

Eight umbrella-like gizmos were pushed up and down by the camshaft to provide lift as it pulled the umbrellas down.

In April of 1900 Heintz climbed aboard the open cockpit (he called it the pilot house) of what he hoped would be his flying machine. He hit the switch—or whatever he did to get the steam engine to turn the camshaft.

As it struggled mightily and loudly to gain even a foot of airspace on the usually quiet Aurora side street, the town’s horses reared, chickens cackled, pool hall engineers swallowed their quids, and the Devil’s Food cakes in Aurora housewives’ ovens all fell in on themselves.

Heintz’s experiment never got off the ground but found a home in history’s scrap heap. Three years later, the Wright Brothers made aviation history.

Heintz died in 1918. His vault in the Elkton cemetery was ready. His glass-topped casket was carried inside and placed near the crypt door. The glass top was his idea. He was a died-in-the-wool taphophobe and had a lifetime fear of being buried alive.

At his request, a key to the crypt’s door was hung on a nail within reach of his glass-topped casket. If by chance he would awaken from his deep slumber, he could open the casket lid, grab the key, open the crypt door, and step out for a breath of fresh Elkton air and maybe even light up a good cigar.

But what if he might awaken too weak to slide the casket’s glass top open? He arranged for a youngster to come to the crypt every day for a week after his burial and peek in to make sure he was actually fully deceased. During his second week of entombment, the boy—probably greatly relieved—was instructed to check him out just once every other day.

I’ve driven by the Elkton crypt a couple of times. The remains of eight or nine of his relatives are there now with Henry.

I can only assume his casket and its glass top are still inside, probably well covered with time’s dustings after all these years.

But who knows? Maybe Heintz, who always dreamed of flight, awoke from his eternal dream one dark night, slide back the glass-topped coffin cover, grabbed the crypt door key and by golly flew the coop?