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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  They just want this Californy,

  So’s to bring new slave states in.

  Then it was on to Xenia, to visit another cousin William, who was apprenticed to a chairmaker. They drove down the Yellow Springs Road late that afternoon, turning onto the Dayton-Springfield Pike just at the corner of William Huffman’s cow pasture. Cousin Samuel urged the team on through the little farm town of Fairfield, Ohio, toward his father’s homestead near the village of West Charleston on the National Pike.

  For twenty-one-year-old Milton Wright, it had been a day full of unrecognized portents. It was the first time he had ever seen Dayton, the city where he would spend so many years of his adult life. And the first time he had seen Huffman Prairie, where he would one day fly with his sons.1

  Extended family visits were to form a central element in the pattern of Milton Wright’s life. He was a man with a great sense of family, who sought to maintain contact with his most distant aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces either through personal visits in the course of his church travels or by letter. After his marriage to Susan Koerner in 1859, he added her relatives to the list of family members with whom he wished to remain in touch.

  Wilbur and Orville Wright inherited strength of character, firmness of purpose, and absolute confidence in their own abilities from their father, Milton Wright, seen here as a rising young churchman.

  In later years all of this would find a natural expression in his hobby—genealogy. Milton Wright was conscious of his position as a single link in a long familial chain connecting the past, present, and future. He scoured the nation for books and manuscripts, church records, tombstone inscriptions, and anything else that would fill the gaps in his knowledge of the family tree.2

  His surviving correspondence includes letters to historical societies, relatives, suspected relatives, local genealogists, and complete strangers who might be able to add to the store of minute details he had amassed on his background. Like all good historians, Milton Wright was aware that the “facts” he had gathered were a mixture of the “reliable,” the “uncertain,” and the “probably fictitious.”3 The experience taught him a lesson. He would document his own life with extraordinary care in half a century’s worth of pocket diaries and in his bulging correspondence files. The importance of documentation was a lesson that he passed on to his children, along with his enthusiasm for genealogical research, and so much else.

  By the 1890s, Milton could take justifiable pride in his ability to trace “the genealogy of my foreparents on all sides for as far back as my great-grandfather’s great-grandparents, and some of them farther.” When asked for information on the family background, he could respond with a lineage that sounded like an American version of the “begats” of Noah:

  Dan Wright (my father) was the third son of Dan Wright, who was the third child of Benoni Wright, who was the tenth child of Samuel Wright, who was the fifth child of James Wright, who was the second son of Samuel Wright, our first American ancestor of the name, who was born in England about the year 1600, settled at Springfield, Massachusetts in 1637 or before, less than twenty years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock.4

  That first American Wright, Samuel, was the great-great grandson of John Wrighte, who, with his wife Olive, had purchased Kelvedon Hall, Essex, in 1538. Samuel, a Puritan, was part of the “Great Migration” to Massachusetts, arriving in Boston in the early 1630s. He was among those who established Springfield Township in 1636. In the absence of an ordained Puritan minister for the local Congregational church, he was appointed to “dispense the word of God for the present.” He moved to Northampton in 1656 and died there nine years later, asleep in his chair.

  Samuel’s great-great grandson, Dan Wright (never Daniel, as Milton Wright was careful to point out), was born in Lebanon township, Connecticut, on April 7, 1757. A veteran of the Revolution who saw service at Bemis Heights and Saratoga, he worked as a carpenter and farmer following his discharge from the patriot army. He married Sarah Freeman in 1785 and settled in Thetford Township, Orange County, Vermont, where their third son, also Dan, was born on September 3, 1790.

  Young Dan, Milton Wright’s father, was well educated in the country schools of Vermont, and taught a session himself before joining his older brother Porter and sister-in-law Lois on a farm in the Genesee Valley of New York in 1813. The following year, the entire Wright clan—the elder Dan, his wife Sarah, and their four children, Asahel, Porter, Dan, and Eliza—pulled up stakes and moved west. They traveled overland to Olean, Pennsylvania, then rode a flatboat down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers to Cincinnati. After a quick survey of available land, the family settled on a farm near Centerville, eight miles south of Dayton, in Montgomery County, Ohio.5

  Dan, the youngest son, was the first to leave. He married a local Centerville girl, Catherine Reeder, not yet eighteen, on February 12, 1818. Milton Wright took great pride in the fact that his mother was the product of two first-generation Ohio families. Her maternal grandfather, John Van Cleve, had the dubious distinction of being the only white settler to be killed by Indians within the city limits of Cincinnati. Legend had it that her mother, Margaret Van Cleve, was the first white woman to set foot in what became Dayton.6

  In February 1821, Dan and Catherine Wright and their sons—two-year-old Samuel and Harvey, an infant of five months—followed what had become a family tradition, moving west. They set up housekeeping on an eighty-acre farm in the green woods of what was soon to be Rush County, Indiana. The first winter was difficult. Dan had purchased his land from a speculator who had promised that a finished cabin would be ready to accommodate the young family. When the Wrights reached their homestead, they found the promised shelter occupied by a family of twelve, recently arrived from Virginia. Rather than forcing this brood out into the cold, the Wrights moved into one half of a larger double cabin that housed the proprietor, his wife, and six children.7

  Dan completed work on his own cabin that spring. It was a simple affair—the walls were “chinked” with dried grass and wood chips, but not “daubed” with mud. There was a wooden puncheon floor, however, and a good solid roof. The family girdled trees the first year and cut them the second, clearing a total of ten acres, five of which were planted with corn each season. There were no cattle or horses for plowing; the work was done by hand with a hoe. Catherine bore a third son here, George, who died in infancy.

  Dan sold this tract to a Mr. Parker in 1823, and moved his family to a new farm a mile and a half to the southeast. With later additions, the Wright place would eventually grow to a full quarter section, 160 acres. Four more children were born here—Sarah (Nov. 21, 1824); Milton (Nov. 17, 1828); William (Feb. 29, 1832); and Kate, who died at birth, probably in 1834.

  Dan and Catherine, setting down roots on the Indiana frontier, maintained close contact with the other members of the Wright family who had come west together in 1814. Asahel, Dan’s eldest brother, wrote often. He had established himself as a farmer, postmaster, and storekeeper on a 113-acre lot in the village of West Charleston, Bethel Township, Miami County, Ohio. He proudly reported that his new place included “a two-story hewed log house, 24 feet by 20, shingled roof, Porch on each side—a hewed log cabin, a log barn with a shingle roof—60 feet by 24—60 acres cleared & well fenced, an orchard of 120 good apple trees, plenty of Peach trees, a large spring of never failing water near the house—a good smoke house & corn crib besides.”8

  Asahel’s letters to Dan covered a range of topics, from politics (Dec. 26, 1828: “I suppose you know that Jackson is to be our next President. I consider the fact a poor compliment to the intelligence & candor of the American people, and well calculated to strengthen the faith of them who believe that it falls not to the lot of man to give permanency to a free government.”) to local farm prices (Feb. 20, 1829: “Wheat is now one dollar a bushel in this part of the country”). He described the opening of the Miami and Erie Canal between Cincinnati and Dayton, and offered a running account o
f progress on the National Road, from congressional debates on funding through the actual construction of the highway past his front door.

  Of course there was family news to relate—condolences on the death of relatives, wishes for the speedy recovery of a sick wife, and congratulations on the birth of a child. On February 20, 1829, Asahel wrote to welcome Dan and Catherine’s “fine new son” into the family, and to express the hope that “his life may be long, and a blessing to you, himself, and his country.”9

  That boy, Milton Wright, would grow up on the raw, trailing edge of the frontier. When the family moved into the area, Rush County had not yet been organized. Wolves, wildcats, bears, wild boar, and the occasional Indian trapper still roamed the woods. Clothing was homemade linsey-woolsey and grain was still ground with hand mills and hominy mortars. It was a far cry from Asahel Wright’s store in settled, stable Ohio, where customers purchased calico and “domestic plaids” by the yard and the “best green coffee” was to be had at 20 cents a pound.

  “Society,” as a Rush County pioneer noted, “was in a chaotic state.” The population was a mix of older frontiersmen, farm families filtering north from southern Indiana and Kentucky, and new arrivals from the more settled East. Violence was a way of life. One observer said that elections were an excuse for “bloody demonstrations of strength and pluck.” A resident of Tippecanoe County recalled that “black eyes, bruised noses, and bit fingers” were local badges of honor.10

  They called themselves “Hoosiers,” though no one was quite sure why. Some claimed it was derived from the words of an old backwoodsman who, upon hearing a knock at the door, would bellow out, “Who’s Yere?” James Whitcomb Riley, the Indiana poet whom Milton Wright so admired, related a tale popular in the southern part of the state. A stranger entering a tavern after a savage, eye-gouging brawl noticed a strange object on the floor and inquired, “Whose ear?” In fact, the word probably stemmed from “hoozer,” a term applied to backwoods mountaineers in the dialect spoken in the Cumberland mountain country that was home to so many who settled southern Indiana.

  Those who sought to bring the first trappings of a settled community to east-central Indiana often had a difficult time of it. According to local tradition, the first newspaper in Rush County, the Dog-Fennell Gazette, was a single-sheet affair printed on only one side. Subscribers were asked to return their back issues so that the publisher could print his next number on the reverse.11

  Like so many youngsters who grew up in this environment, Milton Wright would eventually forget the hardships while retaining his fond memories of the family cabin, his first schoolhouse, and “the old log church on top of the hill where my mother was a member.”12 We know almost nothing of the personality of the woman who worshipped in that church. Milton, who offered such clear and perceptive characterizations of his seventeenth-century ancestors, spoke of his mother in terms so pious as to be empty of meaning.13

  By contrast, the memory of his father would always remain sharp and distinct. Milton tells us nothing of Catherine’s appearance, but he describes Dan down to the film that covered one of his deepset blue eyes, the result of an accident suffered while working on his brother Porter’s Genesee Valley farm in the winter of 1813.

  “He was five feet nine inches in height,” Milton recalled thirty years after his father’s death,

  and straight as an arrow. He weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. His features were regular…. His temples were slightly sunken, and his head and forehead high. His hair was dark, straight and thin, but not inclined to baldness, even at seventy. He was grave in his countenance, collected in his manners, hesitating in his speech, but very accurate. Unless much excited, there was little change in his countenance and manners. He did not push acquaintance with strangers.14

  Milton’s graphic portrayal of his father can be read as a remarkably accurate description of his own sons, Wilbur and Orville. Nor was the resemblance limited to physical features or mannerisms. Dan Wright passed his strength of character, sureness of purpose, and sense of high moral resolve along to his son and grandsons as well.

  “In reform,” Milton noted, “he was a generation ahead of his times.” Dan Wright was a man with very firm beliefs and a willingness to stand up for them, whatever the cost. He was an ardent abolitionist, voting for the Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney in the election of 1844. That alone was enough to get a man strung up in some parts of southern Indiana.15

  Dan Wright’s fierce egalitarianism and independent spirit were reflected both in his abhorrence of Freemasonry and “all of its satellites,” and in his refusal to join an established church. He had undergone conversion in 1830, and was a devoted reader of the Bible, but could not find a local congregation he regarded as being sufficiently vehement in support of the antislavery cause.

  Dan Wright was a total abstainer in a country where a man’s worth was often judged by the amount of “Monongahela-Durkee” he could absorb before collapsing. Nor was it enough to speak out in favor of temperance. On more than one occasion he accepted a lower price for his corn than most of his neighbors because he refused to sell to the high-paying local distillers.16

  Dan Wright’s opinions would have a profound impact on Milton, who cast his first vote for John P. Hale, the Liberty Party candidate in 1852. Milton relished the memory of schoolboy debates with “ignorant and incredulous” Rush County classmates who recognized the “outrage and uncertainty” of slavery but feared “saucy free negroes and the danger of them walking with and marrying white girls.” His antislavery sentiment led to “a lively interest in politics.” When the Civil War began in 1861, Milton, then a young preacher in Grant County, Indiana, saw the conflict as part of a divine plan to end slavery. “The president does not mean it; congress does not mean it; but I am confident the Lord means it, and will bring it to pass.”17 Driven by such absolute confidence in his own moral judgment, Milton would make it his business in life to show others the way to the light.

  He was twelve years old when his father sold the second Rush County place and purchased a farm, complete with an unfinished frame house, in Orange Township, Fayette County, Indiana. The move seems to have been a turning point for the boy. “It was here,” he recalled many years later, “that I labored with strong hands, for I had almost my full growth at fifteen, and from my twelfth year had almost perfect health, though I was in delicate health for the six years preceding that time.”18

  Milton found the Fayette County teachers more competent than those in Rush County, where the local Kentucky emigrants “cared little for education.” The boy who had once argued elementary cosmology with classmates “so ignorant as to think that the earth might be set upon a great rock,” now “devoured books with remarkable rapidity, considering the time I had for reading, and with a memory which at that time was a marvel to the family.”19

  He sought to improve himself in every way. He practiced public speaking while at work in the fields, “often attracting the ears of the family, and sometimes the neighbors.” Sam, his oldest brother, taught him algebra, while Harvey, next in line, encouraged his “desire and efforts for careful mental improvement” and advised him to “train” his mind to think. “I did it daily, purposefully, and sometimes laboriously and as systematically as a 13 year old knows how. I did this till hard thinking was so much a habit that I had to regulate this tendency.”20

  Much of this hard thinking was directed toward the subject of religion. Milton Wright had become a “seeker of religion” at the age of eight, following a conversation with his mother. He described himself as “a praying child, although never in the hearing of anyone.” He attended church, listened attentively to the preaching, and often left the services “powerfully impressed” and “fully resolved to be converted.”21 Time and again, his resolve wore off after a month or two.

  The searching, questioning, and doubting came to an abrupt end in June of 1843. While laboring in his father’s corn field, fifteen-year-old Milton Wright experie
nced conversion. “It was not by forces, visions, or signs,” he recalled in later years, “but by an impression that spoke to the soul powerfully and abidingly…. There was no sudden revolution from great anguish to ecstatic joy, but a sweet peace and joy [which I had] never known before.”22

  The future bishop believed that he owed his “religious impressions” to his mother, who had converted just before his birth in 1828. Catherine’s piety had certainly made an indelible impression on her children—each of her surviving sons chose the church as his career.

  Samuel Smith Wright, the older brother whom Milton thought “endowed beyond any of the family in physical and mental powers,” planned to enter the ministry, but died of typhoid in 1842 while away from home teaching school to raise money for his education. Harvey grew up to be a Primitive Baptist minister, “well known in his church, throughout his State, and in neighboring states.” William, the youngest, became a United Brethren preacher, but suffered an attack of “dyspepsia” which “so impaired his health that his wit in conversation and public speech were never fully regained.” As a result, Milton recalled, he was “so slow in utterance” as to weary his congregation.23

  In spite of the credit Milton gave his mother for directing all her children down the path of righteousness, it is clear that his own religious attitudes were more closely aligned with those of his father. Catherine was a Presbyterian by choice, but usually attended the Methodist Episcopal church close to her home. Like his father, Milton rejected both those faiths. He could not accept some of the Presbyterian tenets and disliked the fact that the Methodist churches seemed “largely filled by persons, who, in his judgment, seemed to be there from motives of popularity.”24