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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  The following day, Orville drove Lindbergh down to the laboratory on North Broadway. Harold Miller, who was a member of the small party accompanying them, remembers a moment that typified Orville’s enthusiasm. As they were walking into the building Orville saw a crowd of old friends watching from the street. With an enormous smile on his face, Orville looked at Miller and pointed to Lindbergh with his hand behind his back, scarcely able to control his glee at being seen with the young hero.3

  President Franklin Roosevelt’s visit to Dayton on October 16, 1940, had a very different tone. Orville’s politics are difficult to categorize. He had some faintly socialist notions about production and finance. An admirer of Roosevelt’s, he was deeply honored by an invitation to join the President and James Cox, ex-governor of Ohio and 1920 Democratic candidate for President (with FDR as his running mate), for a parade and tour of Dayton. When the trip was complete, the presidential car drove back to Hawthorn Hill and was about to turn up the long, winding drive. Orville tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder and asked to be let out on the street, preferring not to take the President out of his way.4

  The banquets, medals, awards, honorary degrees, and visits from distinguished guests were only the beginning. The Wright brothers were the most memorialized Americans of the twentieth century. Of all their countrymen, only Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln have inspired commemorative zeal to match.

  The mythic stature attained by the brothers reflected the nature of their achievement. The airplane was not simply a bit of new technology; it was something akin to a miracle. Flight symbolized the most basic human yearnings. To fly was to achieve freedom, control, power, and an escape from restraint.

  And the invention came from such an unexpected quarter. The Wrights had no special training in science or engineering. While both were well educated, neither had completed the formal coursework required for his high school diploma. Before the summer of 1899, they seemed the most ordinary of men.

  That was part of their fascination. They were the quintessential Americans, whose success seemed compounded of hard work, perseverance, and common sense, with a liberal dollop of Yankee ingenuity—raised to the level of genius. It was Horatio Alger writ large. They were proof that the values of an older America retained their validity in a new, complex, and somewhat frightening world.

  The first monument planned to honor the Wrights was to have been built at Huffman Prairie. At the time of Wilbur’s death in 1912, forty prominent Daytonians formed a Wright Memorial Committee to commemorate the events that had occurred there. They proposed to erect two Greek columns, “if possible obtained from the ruins near Athens,” in the middle of the Prairie. The simple columns would be “thoroughly in keeping with the unassuming modesty of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and fittingly mark this historic spot which will be known to posterity as the cradle of aviation.” In spite of Torrence Huffman’s enthusiasm and some interest on the part of the Greek government, the project languished.5

  Early the next year, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum offered his own design. He suggested that the committee commission “a heroic figure, part human, part divine, or rather of a human being transformed into an angelic spirit with wings, typifying man’s mastery of the air.”6 Nothing came of this proposal either.

  The earliest memorial actually built and dedicated to the Wrights stands on the open field of Camp d’Auvours, near Le Mans, where Wilbur flew in 1908. Dedicated in 1912, the great black granite boulder was badly scarred as Allied troops fought their way through this area in 1944, but the simple inscription remains intact:

  WILBUR ET ORVILLE WRIGHT

  KITTY HAWK, 1903

  The American ambassador to France unveiled Paul Landowski’s sculptural tribute to the Wrights, a figure with arms stretched up toward the heavens, in Le Mans in 1920. The French Armée de l’Air dedicated yet another monument on the site of the old Wright flying school at Pau in 1935.7

  The first American monument to the Wrights, a five-foot marble shaft, still stands in the front yard of what was once the Methodist parsonage in Kitty Hawk. In 1927, when the federal government announced plans for a great Wright Brothers National Memorial to be constructed four miles to the south at Kill Devil Hills, the citizens of Kitty Hawk, led by Captain William Tate, raised $210 to mark this spot where the first Wright machine, the 1900 glider, had been assembled and flown. This, they argued, was “the bona fide cradle of aviation.”8

  The little obelisk is seldom seen by the tourists who throng to modern Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head each summer. Kitty Hawk, the tiny fishing village that Wilbur and Orville Wright knew, is a collection of widely spaced houses clustered around a school, post office, and convenience store set a mile back from the main beach road. Ask a local citizen for directions to the Wright brothers’ monument and they will send you to Kill Devil Hills, where the grandest of all memorials to the brothers was finally dedicated in 1932.

  It is a lovely thing, a great pylon of Mount Airy granite with wings sculpted into the sides and an aeronautical beacon on top that can be seen for miles around at night. The memorial was conceived in 1926 by Congressman Lindsay Warren as a means of attracting tourist dollars to boost the Outer Banks into the twentieth century.

  At the time, the thin chain of sand islands paralleling the North Carolina coast remained, as Orville Wright once remarked, “like the Sahara.” The sole access to the mainland was by ferry, and the only roads on the Banks were wooden “corduroy” affairs that could be moved in response to the shifting sands.

  North Carolina legislators and the local members of the Kill Devil Hills Memorial Association agreed that Warren’s proposal was a fine idea. Dayton citizens were not so sure. Fred Marshall, editor of the Dayton-based aviation magazine Slipstream, took the lead in the fight against Kill Devil Hills as the site, pointing out that the Outer Banks remained as remote and inaccessible as they had been in 1903. “Who will ever visit this monument if it is built in the wind swept dunes at Kitty Hawk?”9

  Marshall offered an alternative—“a practical and inspiring” museum to house the 1903 Wright airplane, still on loan to the Science Museum of London. The best spot for such a museum, he suggested, was on a high bluff behind the newly established Wright Field, with a clear view of Huffman Prairie.

  Marshall was ignored. A $50,000 appropriation bill introduced by Warren’s ally, Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut, breezed through committee, passed both houses, and was signed into law by President Coolidge on March 2, 1927. Architects Robert Perry Rogers and Alfred Eastman Poor won the $5,000 prize for the monument design. Warren, Bingham, Orville Wright, and Amelia Earhart dedicated the cornerstone on December 17, 1928, in the presence of two hundred “pilgrims” who had braved a series of difficult bus, automobile, and boat rides to reach the site.10

  The Army Quartermaster Corps now had to build the memorial. The first problem facing Captain John A. Gilman, who had recently completed work on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, and his assistant, Captain W. H. Kindervater, was Kill Devil Hill itself. It was not a hill at all, but a ninety-foot sand dune that was moving across the narrow Outer Banks at a speed of twenty feet a year. During the quarter of a century since 1903, it had traveled some 600 feet toward an eventual resting place in the waters of Currituck Sound. If the dune was to serve as the foundation for a monument, it would have to be permanently stabilized.

  Beginning early in 1929, Gilman spent $27,500 to accomplish that task. The area was fenced to keep the hogs and cattle out, then covered with a two-inch layer of straw, leaf, and wood mold extending 300 feet up the slope. Tough, hardy imported grasses—bitter tannic, hairy vetch, and marram—were planted in the artificial topsoil. Once this band of vegetation took root, Gilman extended the planting up to the summit on the northeast side where the prevailing wind struck the dune, then over the rest of the slope.

  By the summer of 1930, the majestic moving dune was transformed into a stable hill, carpeted with green weeds and shrubs. A few
watermelon vines even found a foothold near the top. Gilman and his crew started work on the monument itself in February 1931. Finished the following spring, the granite shaft measured sixty feet from the five-pointed star at the base to the tip of the beacon. The hill raises the total height of the structure to 151 feet above sea level.11

  On November 19, 1932, another party of distinguished guests made their way over the new Wright Memorial Bridge and down a concrete highway to attend the dedication of the finished monument. Warren’s plan to use the monument to lure tourists to the Outer Banks was an enormous success—development followed on a scale beyond his wildest dreams. Wilbur and Orville Wright would no longer recognize the string of neon-bedecked motels, restaurants, gift shops, condominiums, and elegant beach houses that lines the route to their old camp.

  During the twenties and thirties memorials to the Wrights sprang up virtually everywhere the brothers had worked and flown, including College Park, Maryland; Fort Myer, Virginia; and Montgomery, Alabama. Wilbur’s birthplace, a farmhouse near New Castle, Indiana, became a state historic park. Local historical groups in Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia marked the sites of the various Wright homesteads. But Henry Ford’s purchase of the house at 7 Hawthorn and the bicycle shop at 1127 West Third marked the beginning of the most important preservation project involving the Wright brothers.

  Henry Ford, who had made his fortune on the shop floors of urban Detroit, was convinced that his success was based on unyielding adherence to the precepts of an older America. A confirmed social engineer, he saw the historic village and museum as a means of passing on the strength of simple rural virtue to a new generation.

  Ford began his recreation of the past by restoring the old Ford farm and homestead to its condition in 1876, the year in which his mother died. That project was followed in 1923 by the purchase and restoration of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

  The Wayside Inn project has been celebrated as a major step in the historic preservation movement. It was an important step in Ford’s thinking as well, demonstrating the educational value of a restored complex, including a famous building, a working farm, an old-time school, and quaint shops.

  But the history of colonial and early nineteenth-century America was of little interest to Ford. He was convinced that his own past—the lives of ordinary, hardworking Americans of the post-Civil War era—represented the nation’s Golden Age. Greenfield Village was designed to capture Ford’s roseate memories of those years.

  It took shape in an empty field near the Ford engineering laboratory, a mile or so from the huge River Rouge plant. There were two components: a vast museum filled with the objects of American industry and everyday life; and a village made up of historic structures gathered from across the nation. The entire complex would illustrate the way in which the men and women of Ford’s generation had applied rural values in building a new industrial America.12

  Ford was a firm believer in the “Great Man” theory of history, and he thought there was no greater man than Thomas Alva Edison. He named his historic complex the Edison Institute, and moved both the laboratory in which Edison had worked for forty years at Fort Myers, Florida, and the buildings at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where the great man and his team had developed the electric light, onto the site.

  By 1936, Greenfield Village—the outdoor-museum portion of the Institute—was taking shape. It included a few traditional American buildings, such as the Stephen Foster, William Holmes McGuffey, and Noah Webster houses, but concentrated chiefly on fledgling business and industry—a pottery, sawmill, blacksmith and tinsmith shops, a Cape Cod windmill, cooper shop, mine-pumping engine, and machine shop.

  In choosing his American heroes, Ford avoided the traditional emphasis on political leaders and military men, although he did acquire an Illinois courthouse associated with Abraham Lincoln. Luther Bur-bank’s birthplace and laboratory and Charles Steinmetz’s camp seemed more appropriate to him.

  Buildings representing Wilbur and Orville Wright fit perfectly into the scheme of Greenfield Village, but the acquisition of the Wright home and bicycle shop owed far more to Detroit newsman William E. Scripps than it did to Henry Ford. Scripps, an aviation enthusiast who served as president of the Early Birds, a national club for pioneer aviators, had long dreamed of a facility where the papers and memorabilia of fliers could be preserved. That project never materialized, but his early discussions with Ford did achieve results.13

  The first sign that something was afoot came with Orville’s initial visit to Greenfield Village on June 27, 1936. Then, on July 2, Charles Webbert, the Wrights’ old landlord, sold the building at 1127 West Third to Ford for $13,000. The Dayton Daily News broke the story four days later.

  Reaction in Dayton was mixed. Some congratulated Ford on acquiring a historic structure that would probably not have been preserved if left in the hands of local citizens. Others were less pleased. “It is an outrage to let a thing like this happen,” argued Judge James Douglas of the Court of Common Pleas. “First England takes the first airplane and now Henry Ford takes the original workshop….”14

  Henry Ford and his son Edsel paid their first visit to Dayton with Fred Black, the man in charge of Greenfield Village, on October 27. They saw the old bike shop while it was still in place, and discussed plans for its removal and restoration with Orville. The Fords also discovered that the house at 7 Hawthorn might be available. Orville could not understand the Fords’ interest in so undistinguished a building, but promised to see what he could do.

  Milton had willed the house to Katharine, who sold it to Lottie Jones, the washerwoman who had worked for them on Hawthorn Street. Within a month Orville had arranged the sale for $4,100.15

  Edward Cutler, Ford’s preservation specialist, arrived in Dayton to make drawings and photos of both buildings in October. Ford workmen had marked, disassembled, moved, and reassembled them on new foundations in Greenfield Village by February 1937.

  Furnishing the interior of the house and shop proved more difficult than expected. Orville provided a few pieces and a great many of the books from the house on Hawthorn Street. Lottie Jones had preserved some additional items in the house itself. She and her sons milked the Ford establishment for all it was worth, sending several shipments of “newly discovered” material to Detroit on consignment. Fred Black finally returned to Dayton to request a complete list of everything available, so that he could make his selection and reach a financial agreement with the family.16

  The Ford organization located Charlie Taylor, working in the tool-room at North American Aviation in Los Angeles, and hired him to participate in restoring the bicycle shop. He helped Orville and Mabel Beck to locate surviving machine tools used in the shop at the turn of the century, then signed on as a guide once the buildings were opened to the public.17

  The house and bicycle shop were dedicated with appropriate ceremony on April 16, 1938—Wilbur’s birthday. Charles Kettering, now head of the General Motors Laboratory, served as toastmaster. Frank Lahm, Griffith Brewer, and Walter Brookins also spoke briefly. That Sunday evening, the Ford Hour radio program ran a special tribute to the Wrights.

  The buildings are still in Greenfield Village. You can stand in the room where Orville was born in 1871, and the one in which Wilbur died in 1912, or peek into the workshop where a kite, three gliders, and three powered flying machines took shape between 1900 and 1905. The furnishings, particularly those in the typically overstuffed turn-of-the-century Sunday parlor, offer a sense of middle-class life and the taste of the times.

  There are personal touches as well. Orville’s mandolin leans against a wall of the sitting room, as though he has just walked out the door. “Orv began lessons on the mandolin,” Katharine wrote their father not long before Wilbur left for Kitty Hawk in 1900. “We are getting even with the neighborhood at last for the noise they have made on pianos. He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”18

  The interiors of the two b
uildings have been meticulously restored. It is only when you walk outside that you realize how completely Henry Ford succeeded in transplanting the two structures into an environment of his own imagining. Set on a generous plot of neatly manicured grass, framed by shrubs and trees, the Wright home and the world’s most famous bicycle shop have become central features of Ford’s idealized vision of small-town America. The reality of West Dayton—the sense of bustle and activity, change, opportunity, and excitement that marked the streetcar suburb in which the Wrights lived and worked—is entirely absent.

  Dayton had lost its two most historic buildings, but it did eventually get its great monument. It stands just where Fred Marshall thought it should, on the high bluff overlooking Huffman Prairie, two miles to the east. Dedicated on August 19, 1940, Orville Wright’s sixty-ninth birthday, the memorial is a multifaceted thirty-foot shaft of pink North Carolina marble. General “Hap” Arnold flew in for the occasion and told his audience that the monument would “stand as a shrine to aviation as the Plymouth Rock is to America.”19

  You can stand at the stone rail behind the monument and see Huffman Prairie off in the distance. It is one of the few places of importance in the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright that has not changed much since their time. Torrence Huffman leased the Prairie, and 2,075 additional acres which included both the Beard and Stauffer farms, back to the original owners, the people of the United States, on May 22, 1917. All of this land was incorporated into Wilbur Wright Field, a base where the first generation of American combat airmen received their basic training. By the end of 1917, eleven squadrons were operating eighty-five Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies,” and thirty-two Standard S-1 training aircraft in the neighborhood of the last Wright hangar, which remained standing into the mid-1920s.

  Together with Fairfield Air Depot and the Air Service Engineering Division headquarters at McCook Field in Dayton, Wilbur Wright became a center of American flight research during the years following World War I. Air Service test pilots flew the giant six-engine NBL-1, the Barling Bomber, here when the runways at McCook Field proved too short. The talented cadre of engineers and technicians at Wilbur Wright prepared the Douglas DWC World Cruisers for the first circumnavigation of the globe, and the Fokker “Bird of Paradise” for the first flight from the mainland to Hawaii.