The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

At the time of his marriage, Dan Wright was employed in a distillery. But he evidently did not feel comfortable over his occupation and quit the distillery job to devote his whole attention to farming. Moreover, he “got religion” and would no longer even sell his corn to distillers. Perhaps it was because of the strong religious feeling of Dan Wright that his son, Milton, at the age of eighteen, had joined the United Brethren church.

Milton Wright attended a small college in near-by Hartsville, Indiana, and at the age of twenty-two he received from the United Brethren church his certificate entitling him to preach. But he did not at once actively enter the ministry. The pioneer urge was in him and he went to the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, where for two years he was a teacher in a small college conducted under the auspices of the church. It was three or four years after finishing his course at Hartsville that he met the young woman, a student there, who was to become his wife. Mutual friends had spoken to him of Susan Catherine Koerner, of how charming, how “smart” she was, and when he found an opportunity to be introduced to her, he was by no means disinclined to make her acquaintance. They were married on November 24, 1859, a week after his thirty-first birthday.

During the first few years after their marriage, the Milton Wrights lived at several different places in Indiana. Their first child, Reuchlin, was born in March, 1861, on a farm[2] near Fairmount; and Lorin, the second son, a year and a half later, in Fayette County, at the home of his grandparents. When Wilbur was born, April 16, 1867, the family was living on a small farm the father had bought near the village of Millville, eight miles east of New Castle. Wilbur was named for Wilbur Fiske, a churchman whom the father admired; but his name did not include the Fiske. None of the Wright children ever had a middle name.

For a year, the Rev. Milton Wright was minister of a church at Hartsville, and also taught in the college he had attended there. Then, in June, 1869, he became editor of the Religious Telescope, a United Brethren weekly, at Dayton, the home of those pioneer ancestors.

A year or more after their arrival for their first stay in Dayton, the Wright family bought, while it was still under construction, a modest seven-room house at 7 Hawthorne Street. This was on the West Side, across the Miami river, and about a mile from the main business section. Here Orville Wright—named for Orville Dewey, a Unitarian minister—was born on August 19, 1871; and his sister, Katharine, three years later to the day.

During the family’s absence in Cedar Rapids and Richmond, the Hawthorne Street house was rented, but the Wright family was once again to live there, for in June, 1884, the Rev. Milton Wright’s work brought him from Richmond back to Dayton. When, sixteen months later, the tenant’s lease expired and they were settled again at 7 Hawthorne Street, all the family felt that they were where they “belonged.”

The family’s return to Dayton was a few days before Wilbur would have been graduated from high school at Richmond. With the final year of the course so nearly completed, he would have received his diploma if he had been present with his class on commencement day. But Wilbur did not consider the mere diploma itself important enough to justify a trip back to Richmond, even though the distance was less than fifty miles. His decision was a subject for family talks and all agreed that Wilbur should do as he thought best. The father felt, as did the others, that receiving a diploma was ceremonial and less important than the actual education gained.

Wilbur decided to take a special course at the high school in Dayton the next year. He wished especially to continue the study of Greek, and to learn trigonometry.

Orville had been in the sixth grade at Richmond, but a week or two before the end of the year he got into a bit of mischief that caused his teacher, Miss Bond, to dismiss him. She said he could not return to school until either his father or mother came with him to guarantee that his deportment would improve. But his father was away from home at the time, and his mother was too busy packing for the move to Dayton to take time for consultation with that teacher. Orville simply stayed out of school for the rest of the year.

When he entered school in Dayton the next September, with no certificate to show that he had completed the sixth grade, it looked as if he might have to be in that grade for another year. But Orville was so violent and uncompromising in his protests that the school authorities said he might try the seventh grade until they could see how well he got along. At the end of the year he passed into the eighth grade with the highest mark in arithmetic in the city.