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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  I have spent for pens 10 cents; Hair cutting 25; Paper 20; Drilling .05 cents; Speller .05 cents; Club Treas. $2.50. I paid both mine and Reuch’s assessment and $1.57 for cooking; Shaving Cup .15; Necktie 50 cents. Making in all five dollars and 37 cents since I wrote last. Reuch gave me $ five of the last money you sent. We owe Prof. Fix $2.25 for wood and we have not paid for Room rent or tuition. We get scholarships for $ 14.00. We will owe some more before you can send some down so please send enough down so we won’t always be out of money.21

  Lorin assured his mother that they were trying “to get along cheaper.” They roomed with the college president, and boarded with a Mrs. Case, who was “nearly starving before we had her cook for us.”22

  The Brethren schools were a far cry from the best American higher education could offer. Hartsville had an enrollment of some fifty-two students during the year 1882–83. Lorin’s shaky grammar, his requirement to purchase a speller, and the fact that he made some extra money teaching Spencerian penmanship to fellow students, does not speak highly of the entrance standards.

  Still, Lorin at least seems to have thrived at Hartsville. During his freshman year he served as secretary of the Philomatheon Literary Society, and delivered an address entitled “Building for the Ages” at the anniversary exercises on June 14, 1882.23

  A little education was apparently enough for both boys. Instead of returning to school in the fall of 1883, they moved back to Dayton and took rooms in a boardinghouse at the corner of Third and Euclid. Lorin found work as an assistant bookkeeper at the Van Arsdall & Garmen Carpet Store, while Reuchlin took a job clerking in a lumberyard.

  Wilbur began his senior year at Richmond High School in September 1883. His schedule of classes would daunt a modern honors student: Greek, Latin, geometry, natural philosophy, geology, and composition, with general scholastic averages of 94, 96, and 95 for the first three terms.24

  He was an athlete as well, excelling at gymnastics and particularly, his father would recall, “as an expert on the turning pole.” He enjoyed riding the high-wheel bicycle he had purchased with his own money, and may even have developed an interest in a young woman classmate. Milton and Susan talked of sending him on to Yale.25

  Orville seemed destined for commerce. As a six year old back in Dayton he had gone from house to house with his wagon collecting bones for sale to the local fertilizer plant. In Richmond, he pressed Katharine into service helping him collect scrap wood and metal for delivery to a junkyard. He also built and sold kites to his playmates, and organized a local amateur circus performance.

  Wilbur made his pocket money assisting his father on the Richmond Star. Family tradition has it that he constructed a special machine to fold the papers for mailing. He also helped his brother build a six-foot treadle-powered wood lathe. Orville would later recall that this was their first joint venture in technology.

  The few idyllic years in Indiana came to an end in June 1884, when Milton decided to move the family back to Dayton. Certainly, it cannot have been an easy decision—their twelfth move in a quarter of a century of married life. Henry County was home, close to the place where Milton had been born and both of them had grown up. Their farm was at the center of the preaching circuits for which Milton was responsible, and near Richmond, Indiana, where his Radical newspaper was published. Susan, now fifty-three and already in poor health, not only had Milton home more often but was close to her aging mother, her sister, and childhood friends.

  Wilbur was about to graduate from the high school in Richmond. The move was so quick and abrupt that he would not be able to attend the commencement exercises with his classmates, or officially complete the courses required for graduation. They would not even be able to return to their own home. The lease held by the family renting 7 Hawthorn Street still had sixteen months to run.

  Yet the reason for the move was clear to everyone: Milton, rested and refreshed, was ready to return to the fray. The General Conference of 1885 was only a year away, and he would find it easier to marshal his forces in Dayton, the city that remained the unofficial headquarters of the church and the home of its publishing house.

  On June 14, 1884, Milton and his youngest sons, Wilbur and Orville, carefully loaded their worldly goods onto the Dayton train. The boys, assisted by Lorin and Reuch, who were already living and working in Dayton, would supervise the move into a rented house at 114 N. Summit Street. Susan and Katharine would follow on June 17.

  Milton remained behind in Indiana for a few more weeks on business. On June 20 he received a letter from his wife. The new house, she informed her absent husband, was “in miserable order.”26

  chapter 5

  TIMES OF TRIAL

  1884~1889

  Few outside the family circle knew or understood Milton Wright better than his fellow clergyman, A. W. Drury. “By his strain of Puritan blood, by primal instincts, and by association,” Drury pointed out,

  Milton Wright was committed to moral reform. His outlook was not confined to his own Church but extended to society at large. From first to last he was opposed to slavery, the rum traffic, and secret societies. His position in the earlier part of his career was strictly that of the Church at the corresponding time. His being made editor in 1869, and Bishop in 1877, was with the understood purpose on the part of the majority in the General Conference to make stronger the historic position of the Church in regard to secret societies. Under the stress of experience, and with changed conditions, the Church, almost unconsciously to itself, came to change … but Bishop Wright, with some others, stood by the position of the Church without change.1

  By the time he came back to Dayton in the spring of 1884, it was apparent that church opinion was running heavily against Milton and the other members of the dwindling Radical party. Moreover, there was a personal price to be paid for continuing the fight against Liberal elements within the church. Milton had failed to win reelection as a bishop in 1881. Now the presiding elders of the quarterly White River Conference voted to cut his already reduced salary by one quarter because he was no longer living in his district.

  The system of proportional representation approved in 1881 would give the Liberals control of the majority of votes at the upcoming General Conference of 1885. The Religious Telescope, once a bastion of conservative strength, now supported a more lenient attitude toward secret societies: “We are living in another age,” wrote Bishop Weaver, a one-time Wright supporter. “Our ecclesiastical machinery must be adjusted to meet these days, and not the days of our fathers.”2

  With power in their hands at last, the Liberals were quick to act for a final resolution of the controversy. On the second day of the conference, which opened in Fostoria, Ohio, on May 14, they pushed through the appointment of a thirteen-man committee to study the need for a thoroughgoing reform of the church structure. The group reported back four days later recommending that the General Conference amend the basic church documents to meet the needs of the modern Brethren.3

  For the next day and a half, the conference debated the questions that had split the church since 1869. Over the futile objections of Milton Wright and the Radicals, the delegates created a twenty-seven member Church Commission that was empowered to rewrite the Constitution, Confession of Faith, and Discipline according to their view of the will of the majority. The results would then be submitted to a vote by all members of the church. The commission itself would oversee the voting, which was to be completed prior to the General Conference of 1889.

  The twenty-year-old split in the United Brethren leadership was no longer simply an internal matter. The apparent Liberal victory attracted considerable attention in the press. The Dayton Daily Journal applauded the creation of the commission as a victory for the forces of modernity over outmoded tradition, characterizing the Liberals as young men of “advanced thought” and “education” who were devoted to “religious progression.” Milton and the Radicals, on the other hand, were portrayed as “men whose ages are in keeping with their ant
iquated ideas,” so set in their ways “that the magnificent oratory of the opposition was powerless to move them.”4

  Religious traditionalists of other faiths took a different view. The Lutheran Standard, for example, charged that “the United Brethrens have permitted false notions of expediency to triumph over Righteousness in their action on secretism.” Under the Liberal element, the church, which once “had a noble record on the subject,” was now “giving way to a craving for popularity.” Milton and his colleagues were urged “to stand up for the right … rather … than yield to the encroachments of lodgery.”5

  Confident of their success, the Liberals sought to solidify their position. And their first step was to elect Milton Wright bishop of the West Coast, responsible for all church activities in California, Washington, and Oregon. As one Liberal explained to a reporter, the action “would send him clear across the Rocky Mountains, where he could not disturb them.”6

  For the next four years Milton would spend six of every twelve months on the road, looking after his West Coast congregations. The other six months would be spent in Dayton, marshaling support for the final battle to be fought out at the General Conference of 1889. If the Liberals believed that Milton Wright would recognize the hopelessness of his situation, they were mistaken. The bishop was never one to accept a vote on a matter of principle.

  Milton and other conservative leaders banded together to form a Constitutional Association, which would hold independent annual conferences for the next four years. In addition, the group established its own newspaper, the Christian Conservator, which began publication in July 1885. From the outset, Bishop Wright was the single most important figure in shaping editorial policy. As a sign of his confidence in the Conservator, he immediately ceased publication of the Richmond Star.

  Milton faced another set of problems at home. Reuchlin was having an especially difficult time of it. He had married Miss Lulu Billheimer, the daughter of United Brethren missionaries, on April 27, 1886. The arrival of a child was always a welcome event in the Wright family, but the birth of Catherine Louise thirteen months later severely complicated Reuch’s already dismal financial situation.

  Susan wrote to her absent husband in July 1889 complaining that Lulu’s relatives were “still sponging off” Reuchlin, who had “no work, and no prospect of it,” and was “clean out of money.” By the end of the summer her patience was wearing thin. “I told him he could come to our house,” Susan explained to Milton, “but not a cent of my money should go to feed the Billheimers.” It was scarcely “worthwhile to try to help him till he shakes the Billheimers off.”7

  Reuchlin and Lulu continued to struggle along in Dayton through the winter. Finally, in February 1889, Reuch boarded a train for Cincinnati and points west, vowing to send for his wife when he found work. A month later the bishop put Lulu and baby Catherine on a train for Kansas City, where his son had taken a bookkeeping job with the South Missouri Lumber Company.

  Reuchlin, the eldest of the Wright children, was a restless young man who distanced himself from the family in later life.

  They remained in Kansas City for thirteen years. Little Catherine Louise died early in 1892. The lumberyard job proved unsatisfactory and Reuch found employment with the Kansas City, Memphis, and Birmingham Railroad. Then, in 1901, convinced that outdoor work would improve Reuch’s delicate health, the family moved to an eighty-acre farm near Tonganoxie, Kansas, where they would remain for the next ten years, raising Jersey cattle and seed corn.8

  Reuch, Lulu, and their three children—Helen Margaret, Herbert, and Bertha Ellwyn—built a good life for themselves in Kansas. But the distance separating Reuchlin from the family back in Ohio was as much psychological as geographic.

  Reuch’s growing alienation was obvious, and puzzling, to other members of the family. “I’d like to do something for Reuch,” Katharine told her father in 1902, “but a person can’t do anything to please him. He is suspicious of everything.”9

  In time, Reuchlin would reveal apparent feelings of inferiority. In 1901, for example, he agreed to negotiate the sale of the 160-acre Adair County, Iowa, farm which Milton had deeded jointly to all four of his sons. Convinced that he had been cheated on the deal, Reuch informed his father that he would pay each of his brothers the difference from his own share. “I don’t want them to feel that their interests have been injured by anything I did.”10

  In this case, it seems unlikely that Wilbur’s half-hearted response did much to reassure his older brother. “Some matters connected with the sale seem to have … led you to fear that we felt disposed to blame you,” he wrote. “We certainly have no such feeling. We saw … that if foresight had been equal to hindsight, we might have realized a little more from the sale … but as we felt that any of us would have made some errors, we had no disposition to blame you.”11

  Reuchlin became increasingly defensive over the years. He was grateful to receive one of the cash gifts which Wilbur and Orville distributed to members of the family in 1910; at the same time, he wanted his father to understand his financial situation: “I myself have never been a great money maker, but I have managed so far to keep most that has come to me. I am a money saver rather than a money maker.”12

  The depth of Reuchlin’s isolation and estrangement from his family would become painfully obvious at the time of Wilbur’s death of typhoid in the spring of 1912. Reuchlin, Katharine, and Lorin each received a bequest of $50,000. As useful as the money was, Reuch apparently did not believe he deserved an equal share and returned $1,000 to his father. “This is not intended exactly as a gift,” he wrote. “It is some of Wilbur’s money and I am inclined to think perhaps if he had more time for deliberation he might have made some provisions differently in his will.” The money, he told Milton, “is yours to use or give away or do whatever you desire with it that may give you the most pleasure.”13

  The bishop would have none of it. The money was returned to Reuchlin with the comment that Wilbur’s last will and testament was to be regarded as “sacred writ.”

  For a time, Milton and Susan feared that Lorin, their second son, would follow his older brother’s course, drifting away from the family. Like Reuch, he found it difficult to make a decent living in Dayton.

  Lorin left for Kansas City, and the hope of more profitable employment, in the spring of 1886. He returned home that fall, broke and disappointed, but was off once more early the next year, this time settling in Coldwater, Kansas, forty miles southeast of already fabled Dodge City. Lorin arrived in town before the railroad, when Coldwater still lay at the end of a sixty-mile stage ride. It was not until winter set in in late November, however, that the young Ohioan had his first real taste of isolation. Looking out the window of the Comanche County Courthouse one day, Lorin saw a wolf loping down a city street through the snow.14

  Gradually, he took on the coloration of his new environment. He outfitted himself with a cowboy hat, practiced his marksmanship at a gun club, and spoke of joining a hunting expedition headed into the Indian Territory—Oklahoma. He would dine out for the rest of his life on his stories of the Kansas frontier in the roaring eighties. Bat Masterson was still marshal of nearby Dodge when Lorin arrived in Coldwater. The Younger boys, Jim, Bob, and Cole, were behind bars, but Lorin knew the men who had ridden with them, and after them, a decade before.

  He had tasted adventure in Kansas, and was making a living of sorts, but he was homesick. Even the fascination of the prairie landscape had begun to fade by 1888. “We were over on Mule Creek where there are quite a number of small stunted trees,” he told Katharine. “They look fine to a person who has not seen a tree for a year nearly.”15

  He thought that his guitar might ease the winter loneliness. Could Wilbur make a box and ship the instrument via Wells Fargo? Lorin became increasingly anxious for news of home as well. “What does Will do?” he asked Katharine in November 1888. “He ought to do something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?”16

  Lorin’s sarcasm
masked a genuine concern for his brother, who at twenty-one was having great difficulty getting started in life. Wilbur had thrived during the months immediately following the family’s return to Dayton. He enrolled at Central High, not to complete work for graduation but in order to better prepare himself for Yale. Two of his certificates of proficiency survive from this period, one for a course in Cicero (grade 83.5), and the other in rhetoric (grade 87). His friends, next-door-neighbor John Feight and Ed Ellis from down the block, remembered him as an outstanding athlete. Feight recalled that he played on the Central High football team, and was one of the swiftest runners in the school.17

  Lorin, the second son, sampled life in a Kansas cow town before settling into a quiet existence at home in Dayton.

  Wilbur (center rear) was the youngest member of the Ten Dayton Boys, a social club founded by Lorin (right front), Reuchlin (rear second left), and seven of their high school chums.

  He was mature for his age. Reuch, Lorin, Ed Ellis, and six other young West Side men accepted him as the youngest member of an informal social club known as the Ten Dayton Boys. Singing was a favorite pastime; Ellis reported that Wilbur had a fine bass voice.

  Suddenly, all of that changed. Milton Wright describes what happened:

  In his nineteenth year when playing a game on skates at an artificial lake at the Soldier’s Home near Dayton, Ohio, a bat accidentally flew out of the hand of a young man … and struck Wilbur, knocking him down, but not injuring him much. A few weeks later, he began to be affected with nervous palpitations of the heart which precluded the realization of the former idea of his parents, of giving him a course in Yale College; but, tenderly caring for his invalid mother, he, for a few years, pursued a large course in reading, which a retentive memory enabled him to store for future use.18