For the 4,757 residents of Dare County, there was little indication that the third Thursday of December 1903 was going to be much different from other wintry days along the North Carolina coast.

Certainly most wouldn't have guessed that this would be the day that the little town of Kitty Hawk and 90-foot Kill Devil Hill, part of a nearby 26 acres of local dunes, would become almost as well known as New York or Washington.

Fewer still would have realized that they had played a possibly pivotal part in the historic event that captured the world's attention that day - the first sustained powered flight by a heavier-than-air machine.

The names of Orville and Wilbur Wright are synonymous with the birth of manned flight. But most of their local helpers became footnotes to history, if they're remembered at all.

Still, their descendants insist that the extensive aid of the North Carolinians may have made a difference in the success of the first sustained powered flight.

Without them, it certainly would have taken place much later than it did.

The Wrights had been experimenting with wooden gliders for the previous three years in this area along the Atlantic Ocean. From the beginning, they had called on local people for help. As the brothers from Ohio launched gliders from the dunes - about 1,000 flights in all - residents brought them food and mail, built sheds, and delivered needed lumber.

"Surfmen" - members of the Kill Devil Hills United States Lifesaving Service Station - held guide wires and ropes for many trial flights.

The leader of those men was Capt. Jesse Ward, who was in charge of the lifesaving station. Captain Ward was responsible for making a schedule that allowed him and his men to help the Wrights carry each of their gliders, which weighed from 50 to 600 pounds, up the steep sand dunes for test after test.

The brothers also entrusted him to ferry glider propeller shafts to Elizabeth City and to ship them back to Ohio for retooling.

On Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers again called on the surfmen, this time to be witnesses to the day's events - just in case success was finally theirs.

Orville Wright set up a 5-by-7-inch glass-plate camera with a black drape cloth, a bellows, and a rubber bulb, which he asked surfman John T. Daniels to squeeze "if something interesting happened."

Mr. Daniels's photograph at the moment of liftoff put the brothers on the aviation map, says his grandson, John W. Daniels of Wingate, N.C. "The Wright brothers were nothing without the photographic proof ... my grandfather took."

"The scientific part of the Wright brothers' flights were developed by them," says Bill Harris, mayor of Kitty Hawk. "But the Wrights did depend on locals to bring them supplies from Elizabeth City," at that time a long and treacherous boat trip down the coast. "I doubt if the Wrights could have launched [the historic] plane without the locals' help."

His view is a common one among descendants of the early residents.

The flight might not have happened if "it not been for the men who lifted the plane and put it on the track," says Grace Daniels, recounting what her father-in-law, John T. Daniels, had told her about it.

The steel rail rack the Wrights had rigged up for launching their gliders was constructed of three 10-foot-long boards and a 10-foot steel beam with bicycle wheels that rested on the track to allow movement. "It took several of those lifesavers to put it on the track," Mrs. Daniels adds. "Two men couldn't have done it by themselves."

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