His work as an itinerant preacher had taken him far and wide, by horseback and train, and he had seen as much of the country as almost anyone of his generation. Sailing from New York to Panama in 1857, he had crossed the isthmus by rail on his way to two years of teaching in a church school in Oregon.
He and Susan had been married in Fayette County, Indiana, close to the Ohio line, in 1859, and settled on a farm at Fairmont, Indiana, where their two oldest sons were born. In 1867, they moved to a five-room, frame farmhouse in Millville, Indiana, and it was there, on April 16, that Susan gave birth to Wilbur. (Both Wilbur and Orville were named for clergymen greatly admired by their father, Wilbur Fiske and Orville Dewey.)
A year later, the family moved to Hartsville, Indiana, and the year after that, 1869, to Dayton, where they bought the then new house on Hawthorn Street. The Reverend Milton Wright had been made editor of United Brethren’s national weekly newspaper, The Religious Telescope, published in Dayton, and this had meant a major increase of his annual income, from $900 to $1,500.
In 1877, after Milton was elected a bishop and his duties with the church were increased still more, he and Susan leased the house and moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Responsible now for the whole of the church’s West Mississippi District, he would help plan and attend conferences from the Mississippi to the Rockies, traveling thousands of miles a year. In another four years, they moved still again, to Richmond, Indiana, where ten-year-old Orville began making kites for fun and for sale, and Wilbur started high school. Not until 1884 was the family able to return to Dayton to stay.
With a population of nearly forty thousand, Dayton had become Ohio’s fifth largest city and was growing steadily. It had a new hospital, a new courthouse, and was up with the rest of the country in the use of electric streetlights. A grand new public library in the fashionable Romanesque style was under way. In another several years the new high school would be built, a turreted, five-story brick building that would have been the pride of any university campus. As was said in Dayton, these were buildings proclaiming “a devotion to something beyond mere material splendor.”
Located on a broad, rolling floodplain in southwestern Ohio on the eastern bank of a great curve in the Miami River, fifty miles north of Cincinnati, Dayton had been settled by Revolutionary War veterans at the end of the eighteenth century and named for one of the original investors in the site, Jonathan Dayton, a veteran, a member of Congress from New Jersey, and a signer of the U.S. Constitution. Until the arrival of the railroads the town had been slow taking hold.
Once, in 1859, the front lawn of the old Greek Revival courthouse was the setting for a speech by Abraham Lincoln. Otherwise not a great deal of historic interest had taken place in Dayton. It was, however, spoken of proudly as a fine place to live, work, and raise a family, as indeed was all of Ohio. Was Ohio not the native state of three presidents thus far? And of Thomas Edison? Another of Dayton’s notable sons, William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, had written that the people of Ohio were the sort of idealists who had “the courage of their dreams.”
By this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics.
In a speech years later Wilbur would remark that if he were to give a young man advice on how to get ahead in life, he would say, “Pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”
If, in 1884, a new railroad station was plainly in need and most of the streets in town were still unpaved, the prospects for future prosperity were brighter than ever. Most importantly, the National Cash Register Company had been founded and was thriving. In little time it would become the largest manufacturer of its kind in the world. Bishop Wright knew his life on the road would continue half the year or more. Nonetheless, there was never a question that Dayton was home.
An important part of the family’s education in geography, not to say a continuing stimulant for their curiosity, was supplied by the Bishop in long letters written during his travels, often while on board a train. However far his travels, his love of his country and its splendors remained abundantly evident. Minneapolis and St. Paul were “cities of marvelous growth, in a wonderful wheat-producing country.” He wrote with enthusiasm and amazement. So steep were the grades over the mountains west of Missoula that three locomotives were required, two in front, one behind, he reported to those at home. His world, and consequently theirs, kept growing. “Yesterday, I came down here, starting at 1:40 a.m.,” he reported in a letter mailed from Biggs, California.
You ought to have seen [the] Siskiyou mountains which we crossed yesterday on the cars. We rose pretty high, and to make grades, wound about for miles to get only a few. After a mile’s run we would come back to 200 feet from where we were before, about 175 feet higher up. We [ran] through several tunnels, but none long, the last at the summit being the longest. It is the grandest scenery and highest rapid grade I ever went through.
From wide reading and observations of life, he had acquired what seemed an inexhaustible supply of advice on behavior, habits good and bad, things to beware of in life, goals to strive for. He lectured on dress, cleanliness, economy. At home he preached courage and good character—“good mettle,” as he would say—worthy purpose and perseverance. Providing guidelines he understood to be part of a father’s duty.
It is assumed that young folks know best, and old folks are fogies. It may be so, but old folks may be as right about new fangles as young folks are about fogy ways.
Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded.
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.
He made a point of treating the three of his children at home with equal consideration and affection, praising each for his or her particular talents or contributions to the family. But plainly his favorite was Wilbur, “the apple of his eye,” as Katharine said.
Wilbur had also been the cause of the greatest worry. In his youth he had excelled in everything. He had been a star athlete—in football, skating, and gymnastics especially—and outstanding as a student. In his last full year of high school in Dayton, his grades were in the 90s in everything—algebra, botany, chemistry, English composition, geology, geometry, and Latin. There was talk of his going to Yale.
But all such plans ended when, playing hockey on a frozen lake beside the Dayton Soldiers’ Home, Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth.