The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  They touched at Acapulco and Manzanilla, “sorry towns.” Milton had a slight chill on July 26, the first symptom of the dreaded Panama fever. By the time they reached San Francisco he was a very sick man, his fever so high he almost fainted simply walking aboard the Commodore, the ship that would carry them on to Portland. T. J. Connor, a fellow mission worker, nursed him through the delirium that followed, when, as Milton later recalled, “my thoughts with painful vigor flew over the universe.”11

  His recovery was very slow. Milton was still “quite weak and stupid” when they transferred to the Hoosier at Oregon City for the final leg of their journey to Butteville, Oregon. He preached his first sermon in Oregon on August 23, then began a slow tour of the Willamette Valley circuits as he regained his strength. Milton fell in love with the Oregon wilderness during his first weeks in the territory. “The breezes had a peculiar roar in the trees,” he wrote, “and the memory of the sound was lasting.”12

  Posted to the Lane County Circuit in mid-September, he was still too ill to accept. Instead, he was asked to take over the preparatory department of Sublimity College, an embryonic United Brethren school. He opened classes on November 23 with twenty-seven “scholars.” Under his leadership, Sublimity grew and prospered. He spent the next two years teaching and administering the school, and making the rounds of various Oregon circuits as a preacher.

  Milton remained in close touch with his family by mail. William received constant letters describing his life in the Oregon wilderness; there was also a steady flow of letters to and from Susan, “the girl I left behind.”

  His first tour of missionary duty completed, he sailed from Portland on October 7, 1859. His plan was to return home, marry Susan, and come back to Oregon to spend his life in the service of the West Coast conference. As before, he enjoyed the trip, attending a lecture on Arabia by the renowned traveler Bayard Taylor in San Francisco before boarding the steamer Sonora, bound for Panama. Taylor and his wife; Lansing Stout, U.S. representative from Oregon; and U.S. Senator Joseph Lane were among his fellow passengers.

  Arriving at Panama City, they received word that “Ossawatomie” John Brown had been captured by Virginia authorities following a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Senator Lane, who would run as the Southern Democratic candidate for Vice President with John C. Breckinridge in 1860, remarked, “I would have him hung higher than Hammon without judge or jury!” Milton, while never a violent man, felt some admiration for Brown, and chided the senator for making a remark obviously intended to reach the ears of the press.13

  He arrived back home in Fayette County on November 14, 1859, after an absence of two years, four months, and nineteen days. “Mother,” he noted in his diary, “almost overcome with joy.”14

  Milton visited the Koerners the next day. Apparently all doubts were now resolved. One week later, on November 22, he obtained a marriage license. He and Susan were married by the Reverend John Fohl shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of November 24—Thanksgiving Day—1859. He was four days short of his thirty-first birthday; she was twenty-eight.

  The long years of waiting had been worthwhile. This was to be a very successful marriage. A quarter of a century after his wife’s death in 1889, Milton continued to honor their anniversary, her birthday, and the anniversary of her death. On July 4, 1908, he wrote a poignant letter to his son Wilbur, who was preparing to give his first public demonstration flights in France: “I went to your Mother’s grave this forenoon, and laid a little bunch of flowers on her grave. Nineteen years ago she departed. Of course I miss her most. Her benediction rests on you. She was so humble, cheerful, meek, and true….”15

  It is clear that he regarded Susan as the ideal wife and helpmate. The best advice he could give his daughter was that she strive to attain “some of her Mother’s love of calm and solitude,” so that she might “Flourish like the palm.”16

  Susan was a good and dutiful wife, even by the rigorous standards of the period. There was assuredly much more to her than that, however. She was a woman with a will, if not a constitution, to match her husband’s. She accepted Milton’s religious calling as her own. Her duty, as she saw it, was to create a home that would provide him with loyalty and support, and to raise the children into healthy, strong adults with the moral fiber that would enable them to take their place as good Christians and model citizens.

  Her health was never good. She suffered periodic bouts with malaria, rheumatism, and a variety of other ills. Yet she bore Milton seven children—the first when she was twenty-nine, the last when she was forty-three. She packed and moved her family twelve times in thirty years of married life—without a complaint. She was a capable, independent woman, devoted to her family.

  The dream of returning to Oregon faded as the young couple settled into married life. They moved into their first home, a farm near Rushville, late in 1859. Milton earned $25 a month teaching the winter term at the New Salem subscription school, six miles southeast of town. “Here my wife and I were happy,” he reported. As a professional experience, it was a good deal less pleasant. “Some of the large scholars were insubordinate, and injured the discipline of the school,” he recalled. In April 1860, they moved to Andersonville, where Milton accepted a teaching position at Neff’s Corner. Again, it was a “less pleasant experience” than it had been when he taught here in 1855.17

  Finally, in the fall of 1860, he received a regular church appointment to the Marion Circuit. The couple moved back to Milton’s Grant County farm, four miles east of Fairmont, where they established their first real home in a hewed log building on the lot. They would spend the next four years here, while Milton rode various White River Conference circuits. In addition, as he later recalled, “I tried to farm a little.”18

  Their first child, Reuchlin—named for Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), a German theologian and humanist—was born here on March 17, 1861. Milton, convinced that the name Wright was too common, was determined to give his children distinctive first names.

  Having married relatively late in life, Milton and Susan were the proudest of parents. “Reuchlin weighed about twenty pounds a month ago,” Milton informed his brother William on November 27, 1862. “His flesh is solid—his cheeks red—and he is just as full of life and good nature as he can be.”19

  Lorin, the second son, was born in Dan Wright’s home twenty months later, on November 18, 1862. Dan had died on October 6, 1861; Milton, hurrying to his father’s bedside, had arrived too late. Now his widowed mother supervised Lorin’s delivery. The boy was named for a town selected at random on a map; the parents thought it sounded nice.

  Milton’s letters to other members of the family were soon filled with news of childhood ailments and accidents, as well as a surprising amount of detail on the children’s development. He was, and would remain, a very observant father. Lorin was down with a fever. Reuch, (pronounced “Roosh”), had burned his hand “smartly” on the stove, but was recovering. He was a year old when he began to walk; Lorin walked at eleven months, and was soon “running about.”20

  The Wrights were on the move again in 1864, living in a series of rented houses as Milton moved from circuit to circuit in the Marion, Dublin, and Williamsburg districts. Late that fall, he acquired additional property, a five-acre farm with a three-room house near Millville, eight miles east of New Castle, Indiana. He paid $550 in cash, with the promise of $200 more to be paid within two years, interest-free. Family tradition has it that the property was purchased with money presented by the Wright and Koerner families at the time of Milton and Susan’s wedding.21

  For the moment, the farm was only an investment, not a home. Milton’s church salary at this point was approximately $200 a year; the family could also count on perhaps $35–50 a year in money from crop and timber sales from the Grant County Farm. As the owner of two farms, Milton now received not only the extra share of crop money but an additional $20 a month in rent for the Millville farm.22

  Like all good
Brethren, Milton was a pacifist. During the Civil War he did not enter the Army or preach sermons to the troops, yet there was no doubt where he stood on the issues. “May it prove to be an irrepressible conflict in the fullest sense of the term, ending oppression’s rule,” he remarked in a letter to a friend. “I made no party speeches,” he told his children many years later, “but I, on many occasions, condemned slavery and advocated the Union cause.”

  Those wartime sermons were described as “temperate in word, but radical in principle.” He was invited to deliver special sermons on the occasion of the recapture of Fort Sumter and the death of President Lincoln. Like the President, he argued that leniency and understanding should be extended to the defeated Confederacy.23

  Not long after the end of the war, they finally moved onto the Millville farm. Susan gave birth to their third son, Wilbur—named for Wilbur Fiske, a clergyman whom Milton admired—here on April 16, 1867.

  The boy was born with a head his father described as being “two stories high.” Milton, a long-time amateur phrenologist, was concerned but found some humor in the situation. Later, he would tell reporters that while his son’s appearance had improved with age, it was several years before Susan could find a hat that did not look silly on the youngster.

  “Willy,” as his father insisted on calling him for several years, took his first step on February 4, 1868, when he was ten and a half months old. After that there was no stopping him—“At fifteen months, when turned into a room he seemed to see all the mischief available in it at a glance, and [he] always found the greatest first.”24

  The year after Wilbur’s birth, the family returned to Hartsville, where Milton had been named the first professor of theology in the history of the United Brethren Church. The post was an indication of his rising position within the loosely knit hierarchy. Milton did well both as pastor of the college chapel and in his teaching and administrative duties. His success helped to lay the foundation for the establishment of the church’s first professional training school, the Union Biblical Seminary, later Bonebrake Theological Seminary.

  Milton would have good reason to remember the General Conference of 1869 in years to come. For the first time in the placid history of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, there were serious signs of dissension. The key issue related to the continued support of the anti-Masonic doctrine established in the Constitution and the church Discipline of 1841.

  A group of young ministers—Liberals, as they would come to be called—argued that the church must be brought into step with the times. Secret societies no longer aroused the horror that they had in 1840. The Masonic order had grown from a membership of perhaps 5,000 during the 1850s to as many as 200,000 members by 1865. Membership in a lodge or fraternal order offered a sense of belonging and identity so often missing in the lives of Americans who had left farms, small towns, or villages for the big city. During the years after the Civil War, businessmen and professionals joined these organizations in unprecedented numbers. The church must reflect the change in social values, the Liberals argued, or suffer the consequences of declining membership and lost revenue.

  Others, including Milton Wright, were appalled at the suggestion that the church should abandon its traditional stand on this issue. In time, this group of conservative churchmen would be most inappropriately dubbed the Radicals.

  Milton Wright’s obsessive rejection of Freemasonry was rooted alike in his background and personality. As a social reformer, he was never to move beyond the classic liberal causes of his youth—the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s rights. He believed in, and would fight for, absolute equality of opportunity for all men and women. He was free of the nativist taint, and in later years would assist Asian church groups on the West Coast. Masonry—perceived as an elitist conspiracy whose only real purpose was to confer unfair advantage on its members—ran counter to his most cherished values.

  An open, forthright person, Milton abhorred secrecy as a matter of general principle. The lodge swore a man to oaths that could not be divulged to wife, children, friend, or pastor. Anyone who took such an oath, he believed, set the lodge above family, church, or state.

  Then there were the religious problems. Milton had little serious interest in theological hairsplitting, but he was no Bible-thumping orator. His religion was, in fact, too cerebral for many of the Brethren. Nevertheless, he was a firm Christian. The man of broad vision and courage who supported unpopular social reforms could also argue that Masonic prayers excluded the name of Jesus Christ to “satisfy and gratify” non-Christians.25

  Ultimately, what would set Milton apart from the other Radical leaders was his extraordinary resolve. A Hartsville classmate once characterized him as “more than ordinarily cautious, conservative and methodical in all that he undertook, and when once he decided his course he was hard to turn from it.”26 None of that had changed. Milton saw life as a series of clear-cut moral choices. The real test of character was to be found in willingness to choose the path of virtue and follow it, whatever the cost.

  Most men and women lacked the strength of will required for the task. It was not the path to friendship, popularity, or political success; the temptation to seek harmony and consensus was very great. Yet moral issues were beyond compromise or negotiation. There was no middle ground. Milton Wright saw himself as one of God’s chosen few—a man made of sterner stuff, who was willing to stand up for the right in the face of any opposition from weaker souls.

  The Radical-Liberal split in the United Brethren Church was a perfect case in point. It seemed so simple to the Liberals. The internal dispute that threatened the church did not involve any central questions of theology. They regarded the anti-Masonic stance of the church fathers as a piece of antiquated baggage that had to be jettisoned in order to bring doctrine into line with a changing social order.

  That, to Milton Wright’s way of thinking, was expediency. He wanted no part of a “Creed on Wheels” which could be altered at will to meet changes in public tastes and attitudes.

  For the moment, the Radicals prevailed. There had never been a serious possibility of a Liberal victory in 1869. It was clear, however, that the issue was far from resolved. Two distinct factions had emerged in the church leadership. The questions at issue would expand, for the specific problem of Freemasonry masked a deeper rift over the general question of change in traditional church doctrine and polity.

  Those who favored such change had suffered a temporary defeat, but time was on their side. Their cause would obviously prove popular with the general membership.

  The Radicals recognized the need to buttress their position. As one important step, they sought to maintain strict control over the all-important church publication program. The United Brethren Printing Establishment, based in Dayton, Ohio, was one of the best-equipped religious printing houses in the nation.

  Its most important product, The Religious Telescope, was a weekly newspaper that carried the official church position into Brethren homes across the nation. The editor of the Telescope, like the bishops, was elected at the quadrennial General Conferences. In 1869, the Radicals chose their most vocal spokesman, Milton Wright, for that honor. Quite unexpectedly, Milton had become one of the most influential men in the church. The Wright family would be moving to Dayton.

  chapter 3

  THE PREACHER’S KIDS

  1869~1881

  No. 7 Hawthorn Street is today a vacant lot. Henry Ford moved the two-story white frame house that once stood here to Greenfield Village in the fall of 1936. Transplanted to a plot of manicured grass, framed by shrubs and trees, the structure remains a central feature of Ford’s vision of small-town America.

  The house looked very different when the Wright family moved here in April 1871. The lovely porch that wraps around the front and down one side was missing; there were no pale green shutters on the upper-story windows. Those additions lay twenty years in the future. In the early spring of 1871 the house smelled of raw
lumber and fresh paint.

  Standing here today, it is difficult to believe that a house was ever wedged into the lot, only thirty-seven feet wide. This was a tight, cramped, urban neighborhood. No more than two feet separated the Wrights’ house from its neighbor to the north. You had to turn sideways to pass between the two buildings.

  It was a modest enough home inside, as well. What appears to be the front door, the Wrights used as the guest or visitors’ entrance. Family and friends entered through a side door that opened into the sitting room. The Sunday parlor was to the left, with the narrow, closed stairwell leading to the four bedrooms on the upper story beyond that. The dining room and kitchen were to the right.

  There was an attic above the bedrooms, and a partial cellar beneath the rear of the house. A cistern furnished running water to the sink, supplementing the pump just outside the kitchen door. A carriage shed and outhouse stood at the rear of the lot along the fence.

  In spite of moves to Iowa and Indiana while the children were growing up, the house at 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, seen here on a fall day in 1897, was always home. The wraparound porch and shutters were Wilbur and Orville’s handiwork.

  The city gas lines had been extended through the neighborhood, but the house was not yet connected. Oil lamps provided light, and coal stoves heat. There was a wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen.

  The Wright family came to Dayton in June 1869, immediately after Milton’s election as editor of The Religious Telescope. They rented a house on Third Street until November of that year, when they moved into “John Kemp’s large brick [sic] on Second Street, just east of the Railroad.” Milton purchased the Hawthorn street house from James Manning, the builder, for $1,800 on December 21, 1870, while it was still under construction. The family moved in four months later.