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AT HOME IN DAYTON

A few blocks west of the Great Miami River in Dayton, Ohio, a short walk up South Williams Street can take you more than a century back in time.

Clapboard houses facing the brick street look much as they did at the turn of the twentieth century. The sign over the storefront of the brick building at 22 South Williams bears the name “Wright Cycle Co.” You can see bicycles and a sales counter through the window. Ahead, the brick façade of the Hoover Block commercial building leads to the corner at West Third Street. More than a century ago, this one-block stretch of Williams was the path Wilbur and Orville Wright walked between their home at 7 Hawthorn Street and their places of business along this two-block stretch of West Third—including, from 1895 to 1897, the shop on South Williams. On this sidewalk, in this restored neighborhood, their presence is almost palpable.

The land west of the Great Miami was mainly farmland in the 1860s. The river tended to isolate the area from the main part of town. Even after Dayton annexed it in 1868, residents called it “Miami City” for many years. By the time the Wright family moved there, west Dayton was becoming what historian Tom D. Crouch and others call a “streetcar suburb.” The Dayton Street Railroad Company, formed in 1869, laid Dayton’s first streetcar line on West Third Street, connecting the city from east to west. The line was more to spur land development than to make money with fares. William P. Huffman, the company’s president, owned land along East Third. Vice-president H.S. Williams owned land west of the river. Land that Williams sold for residential development included the lot at 7 Hawthorn. A homebuilder was still finishing the house there when Milton Wright bought it in 1870.

The original Wright Cycle Co. shop at 22 South Williams Street is one of many restored properties in the Wright brothers’ neighborhood. Author’s photo.

Milton Wright was a man of superior intellect, unshakable faith and outspoken convictions—qualities that would ensure a lively and often stormy career as a leader in his church. Born in Rush County, Indiana, on November 17, 1828, Milton became a member of the United Brethren Church’s White River conference in 1853. He served as a missionary in Oregon and principal of Sublimity College, the first United Brethren school on the Pacific coast. He returned to Indiana in 1859 and married Susan Catherine Koerner.

Milton’s church work kept him and his family on the move. He and Susan were living in a log house on a farm in Grant County, Indiana, when Reuchlin was born in 1861. Lorin followed a year later. The Wrights had moved to a farm near Millville, Indiana, when Wilbur was born on April 16, 1867.

In 1869, Milton’s election as editor of the church’s official newspaper, the Religious Telescope, prompted him to pull up stakes once again and move his family to Dayton, home to the United Brethren Publishing House. The family lived in rented homes at first. In February 1870, Susan gave birth to twins, Otis and Ida, who died shortly after being born. The Wright family moved into 7 Hawthorn in December 1870; Orville was born there on August 19, 1871, and Katharine followed three years later, sharing Orville’s birthday.¹

Portrait of Bishop Milton Wright. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

The family moved yet again in June 1878 as Milton’s church business took him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for three years and then Richmond, Indiana, for another three. They returned to Dayton in 1884 and resumed their life at 7 Hawthorn.

Milton steadfastly opposed all forms of inequality, including slavery and secret societies—two issues that would cleave the church into quarreling factions and plunge him into controversy. The Liberals favored changing the church’s constitution to soften its opposition to secret societies such as the Masons, whose popularity was growing across America; the Radicals opposed making concessions in their faith. Milton stood with the Radicals.

The split began in 1869 and grew for two decades until the church broke into two groups—the Radicals’ Old Constitution and the Liberals’ New Constitution. Each considered the other to be the breakaway group. The Religious Telescope reflected the views of the Liberal faction in the church. The Radical faction began publishing its own journal, the Christian Conservator, in July 1885. Orville later found work printing the Conservator.

That same year, Milton won election as bishop of the Pacific Coast district. The May 27, 1885 issue of the Dayton Daily Journal reported that some liberals said they only elected Milton to send him away where he wouldn’t disturb them. Over the next four years, the bishop spent half his time on the West Coast.²

The election came at great personal cost to Milton. It was a time when his younger children were growing up and Susan was in failing health. But the bishop’s travels and the family’s closeness generated a constant stream of correspondence that would document much of what we know about the Wright family.

Wilbur Wright, age thirty-eight, about 1905. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Orville Wright, age thirty-four. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

As they grew into young manhood, Wilbur and Orville shared many similarities. Wilbur stood five feet, ten inches and weighed around 140 pounds; Orville was slightly shorter and heavier. Both had gray-blue eyes and high-pitched voices. Both followed their parents’ morals, eschewing alcohol and tobacco.

Family members would remember Wilbur as quiet and thoughtful. “When he had something on his mind, he could cut himself off from everyone. At times he was unaware of what was going on around him,” his niece Ivonette Wright Miller recalled in later years. Orville she remembered as “a dreamer and idealist, quick to see why things didn’t work and full of ideas as to how he could improve their efficiency.” Wilbur paid no attention to his own appearance, while Orville was fussy about his looks. “I don’t believe there ever was a man who could do the work he [Orville] did in all kinds of dirt, oil and grime and come out of it looking immaculate,” she recalled in Wright Reminiscences, a collection of family memoirs.

Katharine was the bishop’s dutiful daughter, but Milton encouraged her to earn a college degree and pursue a professional career. She graduated from Central High in 1892 and enrolled at Oberlin Preparatory School in 1893, earning a degree in 1898. She returned home to become a teacher at Central High and later Steele High School.

Lorin also remained in the bishop’s orbit. He settled in Dayton, marrying Ivonette Stokes, his childhood sweetheart, and raising four children. He often provided an extra hand when Wilbur and Orville needed help with their aviation experiments. Frequently dropping in at their bicycle shop or 7 Hawthorn, Lorin’s children would gain lifelong memories of their doting, ingenious uncles.

Katharine Wright at about age sixteen. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

Had the Wright brothers not invented the airplane, Orville’s claim to fame might have been as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first publisher. Later to become a renowned African American poet, Dunbar, born in Dayton on June 27, 1872, lived in the neighborhood and attended Central High, the only African American in his class. Orville recalled in later years that he and Dunbar were “close friends in our school days and in the years immediately following.” Between Dunbar’s poetry and Orville’s printing, they shared a passion for the written word. Orville published some of Dunbar’s early poetry in his newspaper, the West Side News. In 1890, when Dunbar decided to produce the Tattler, a newspaper for West Dayton’s African Americans, Orville printed it for him. At some point, Dunbar scribbled a verse in chalk on the wall of Orville’s print shop:

Orville Wright is out of sight

In the printing business.

No other mind is half so bright

As his’n is.³

The paper wasn’t successful, and Dunbar soon folded it. His fame would come later, but he lived a short life, succumbing to tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, at the young age of thirty-three. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Home, where he lived with his mother, is now a state memorial and a unit of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.⁴

Central High School class of 1890 with Orville Wright (center rear) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (left rear). Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

The Wright brothers showed uncommon mechanical aptitude, a gift usually credited to their mother. Milton was a scholar and a writer who stocked the family home with classic literature and books about science and history. Both parents encouraged their children to be inquisitive and inventive, even if that meant occasional misadventures. As Orville later told his biographer Fred C. Kelly for his book The Wright Brothers, “We were lucky enough to grow up in a home environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused our curiosity. In a different kind of environment our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”

After the Wright family’s time in Iowa and Indiana, Orville returned to Dayton with a budding interest in woodcuts and printing. He renewed contact with an old neighborhood friend, Ed Sines, and discovered they shared a common interest. Ed had a toy-like press that could print only one line of type at a time, but the two boys formed Sines and Wright Printing in a corner of the Sineses’s kitchen. At Milton’s urging, Wilbur and Lorin traded an old boat they had made for a small printing press and gave it to Orville. Milton added a set of type. The press could print pages up to three by four and one-half inches. For them, it was enough to start up a business. They printed a small paper for their eighth-grade schoolmates dubbed the Midget and then printed some small circulars.⁵

The Wright family lived at 7 Hawthorn Street from 1871 to 1914. Wilbur and Orville added the porch. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Orville’s interest in commercial printing continued to grow. Sines and Wright relocated to the “summer kitchen” at the back of 7 Hawthorn, where the boys began printing small commercial jobs. With Wilbur’s help, Orville built a press of his own design using a damaged tombstone, scrap metal and other found objects. The new press could handle sheets up to eleven by sixteen inches. He took on bigger, more difficult jobs under a new imprint, “Wright Bros: Job Printers, 7 Hawthorn Street.”

Orville built a bigger press in 1888, again using cast-off hardware and materials, including the folding top of an old buggy. Wilbur helped him figure out how to design some of the moving parts. It could do commercial-grade printing, as Orville described it in a July 20, 1888 letter to their father. “Our new press is large enough to print two pages of the [Christian] Conservator at once. We can run off tracts at the rate of about 500 an hour…When we have it done, I think we can run off about 1,000 or more an hour.” Publishing the voice of their father’s fellow Radicals was just one way the Wright children would rally to their father’s cause in the embattled church.

The press was an early example of the Wright brothers’ innovative thinking. Kelly’s biography of the Wright brothers recounts a visit by the pressroom foreman of a Colorado newspaper who had heard about the Wrights’ one-of-a-kind machine. After inspecting the press and even lying flat on his back underneath it to watch it operate, he declared, “It works all right, but I still don’t understand why it works.” Like this press foreman, the leading thinkers in aeronautics at the time would struggle to recognize how the Wright brothers’ approach to the problem of flight was different from anything that had come before.

Not yet eighteen, Orville used his homemade press to launch his own newspaper. The first issue of the weekly West Side News came out on March 1, 1889. Early editions carried Orville’s name alone, listing him as publisher or editor. A subscription cost ten cents for ten weeks or forty cents for a year. It promised to be “a paper to be published in the interests of the people and the business institutions of the West Side” with the hope that it would “fill the long-felt want of a West Side newspaper.”

Looking west on West Third Street toward Broadway. The Wright brothers would recognize many of the buildings. Author’s photo.

The April 13, 1889 edition reported the paper was moving to “a neat little office on Third Street near the corner of Third and Broadway, where our business will be conducted thereafter. Persons wishing to subscribe for the paper or to insert advertisements will find us in the new building at 1210 West Third Street.” The move to a new office coincided with Wilbur’s increasing involvement in the paper. The April 20 edition listed Orville as publisher and Wilbur as editor. Wilbur’s name didn’t always appear, however.

The Wright brothers’ papers offer glimpses of how the West Side community was developing in the nineteenth century’s closing decade. In those years, Dayton was just beginning to gain many of the amenities of a modern city. It was slow to pave its streets—abundant beds of gravel, left by ancient glaciers, offered a cheap alternative to bricks. And the porous ground was thought to serve as a natural filter, eliminating the need for sewers. Dayton didn’t begin paving streets until the late 1880s, and it didn’t begin installing sewer lines until the 1890s. Electric lighting first appeared in 1883, and natural gas became available in 1889. Such modern utilities were slower to appear on the west side of the river.⁶

The March 30 issue of the West Side News noted that electric lighting and gas heat had come to Hawthorn Street. It also made a mock protest over the impact of natural gas service on jobs supported by the need to get rid of coal ash. “We believe in protection for American labor. Natural gas will force the drivers of our ash-carts to leave the business,” it declared. “Can not something be done to prevent it?”

The same column reported on a transportation breakdown of the sort that happened then: “A streetcar horse dropped dead last Friday morning, a little west of the Fifth Street bridge. The company had bought it the night before and was training it to the car. It began kicking and falling down and was tramped upon by the other horse and run over by the car. Heart trouble caused its death.”

The April 20 issue reported the population west of the river was approaching ten thousand. Cement sidewalks were appearing, grocery stores were opening and local business owners formed an improvement committee. Houses were going up all around the neighborhood. Commercial buildings were rising along West Third. The October 26 issue mentioned the West Side News office had acquired natural gas heat.

At the same time, some conditions still reflected the pioneer era. Like Dayton’s downtown streets in 1889, the west Dayton streets were unpaved. The “Local News” columns in the West Side News occasionally mentioned workers with horse-drawn wagons sprinkling the streets, scraping off mud and laying fresh gravel. But the lack of hard pavement meant rain could leave the horse-trodden streets a muddy, unsanitary mess. The November 9 issue declared, “If Miami City only had as much enterprise about it as it has mud, it would soon be the center of business.”

The paper’s columns were also sensitive to any sign that the city government was neglecting the West Side. An apparently incomplete job of scraping mud from West Third Street drew the paper’s ire in its December 21 issue: “The scraper did some good but it did not get over enough ground. The West Side deserves its share of attention.”

The Wright brothers also published an obituary—their mother’s. After a long illness, Susan died on Thursday, July 4, 1889. Milton described her last hours poignantly in his diary: “About 4:00, I found Susan sinking, and about five awakened the family. She revived about 7:00 somewhat, but afterward continued to sink till 12:20 afternoon, when she expired, and thus went out the light of my home.” The family buried her in Woodland Cemetery on Saturday, July 6.

Wilbur and Orville devoted the second page of the weekly edition dated July 3, 1889, to their mother’s memory. “She was of retiring disposition, very timid and averse to making any display in public, hence her true worth and highest qualities were most thoroughly appreciated by her family and those who were most intimate with her,” they wrote. “Her husband relied upon her as a counselor not only in family affairs, but also in his most important business operations, literary efforts and most responsible acts in church work.”

Katharine assumed her mother’s role as homemaker even while she pursued her teaching career. Her older brothers also were trying to make their ways in the world.

Wilbur and Orville made a serious effort at newspapering. In April 1890, they replaced the weekly West Side News with the daily Evening Item, declaring it a product of “The Item Publishing Company.” The larger, five-column paper had a much more sophisticated look than the West Side News, and it came out every day but Sunday. No longer simply a neighborhood paper, its premier edition asserted, “the great object will be to give readers of the Item the fullest, clearest and most accurate understanding of what is happening in the world from day to day.” A wire service subscription gave the paper access to more news, and the paper published national and regional stories as well as baseball scores and other content.

The Wright brothers had a good press for job printing, but it was no match for the big commercial presses of their downtown competitors. And their exhortations to support the community west of the river didn’t seem to sway the public. They folded the paper after three months. “The reason can be stated in a few words: More money can be made in less work in other kinds of printing, such as job printing, etc.,” they wrote in “Our Parting Word” in their final issue on July 30, 1890. Apparently they weren’t selling enough advertising for a worthwhile profit, and they blamed it on a lack of support for local merchants. “The greatest difficulty we had to contend with is the fact that the people of the West Side will not believe that ‘anything good can come out of Nazareth,’” they wrote.⁷ They continued job printing and moved their operation into the new Hoover Block commercial building at the southeast corner of West Third and Williams.

The early 1890s saw the Wright brothers develop another new interest: bicycling. They joined a national craze triggered by a new English bicycle design called the “safety,” which featured same-size wheels, a geared chain drive and air-filled tires. In 1892, Orville paid $160 for a new “safety” bike—a Columbia. Wilbur bought an Eagle at an auction for $80.⁸

The second story of the Hoover block building housed the Wright brothers’ printing business for a time. Author’s photo.

They were soon using their bicycles to explore the region. In a September 18, 1892 letter to Katharine, who was visiting a cousin in Kansas, Wilbur described an epic ride to Miamisburg by way of Centerville, two towns south of Dayton. Without the benefit of today’s paved bike paths and modern, multi-speed bikes, the hilly route challenged their muscles. They set out from home after 4:00 p.m. and didn’t leave Miamisburg until nightfall. They followed faint wagon tracks in the dirt and gravel to avoid puddles and potholes, but Wilbur summed up the thirty-mile excursion as a pleasant one: “The roads were in fine shape, hard and smooth, and the air was just cool enough to be nice.”

For both brothers, sport quickly turned into business as they began repairing, selling and renting bikes. It was a blossoming industry; Williams’ Dayton City Directory for 1890–91 shows only one bicycle shop in Dayton, but nine were in business by the time Wilbur and Orville opened their Wright Cycle Exchange in 1893. Renting space at 1005 West Third, they stocked up during the winter and opened for business in the spring with the start of the bicycling season. They changed the name of their bicycle business to the Wright Cycle Co. in 1894.⁹

The first bicycle shop location later became the Gem City Ice Cream Company. The company put its name on the building’s façade, and that’s how it became known. In the years after the Wright Cycle Exchange occupied it, the building underwent many modifications, and most of the architecture associated with the bicycle business was lost. Its façade remained as a part of the West Third Street streetscape in 2014, but the structure was in sad shape and at risk of collapse.

The Gem City Ice Cream building at 1005 West Third Street (right) was the location of the Wright brothers’ first bicycle shop. Author’s photo.

The Wright brothers’ mechanical talents served them well in the bicycle business. They brought in money by repairing bicycles when sales were slow. In a September 12, 1894 letter to his father, Wilbur described business as “fair. Selling new wheels is about done for this year, but the repairing business is good.” They were also renting some bikes, he said, but apparently cash was tight. “Could you let us have about $150 for awhile?” he asked. Milton wrote back that he would.

In the same letter, Wilbur confided he had been thinking “for a number of years” about going to college, but he had not felt well enough to try it until recently. Wilbur had been such an excellent scholar in high school that Milton and Susan had thought about sending him to Yale, but a hockey accident at age eighteen led to health problems that caused him to be weak and withdrawn for several years. Instead of Yale, he had tended to his invalid mother and spent time reading deeply.

In his 1894 letter, Wilbur continued, “Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would be better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.” He thought teaching might make a good career; while it paid less than some other professions, “the pay is sufficient to allow one to live comfortably and happily, and is less subject to uncertainties than any other profession.” But he admitted he would need financial help from his father to attempt it. The bishop promised to help, but Wilbur never did enter college.

The demands of the bicycle business soon prompted the brothers to find larger quarters at 1034 West Third, where they sold and repaired a variety of bicycle models. They moved again in 1895 to 22 South Williams. The upstairs housed their printing business. In this location, just around the corner from their old store locations and a few doors down from the Hoover Block, they began making their own brands of bikes.

In 1895, the Wright brothers also briefly had a bicycle shop in downtown Dayton. Milton Wright’s diary entry for Friday, May 24, mentions stopping at “Wilbur’s bicycle store, 23 W. Second Street.”

Wilbur and Orville weren’t yet out of the newspaper business, but the trend was clear. They published a small weekly paper called Snap-Shots at Current Events between October 20, 1894, and January 19, 1895, and from February 29 through April 17, 1896. While the first volume identified it as a publication of Wright & Wright Job Printers, it began its second volume as a product of the Wright Cycle Co. “It will inform its readers why and where to buy bicycles and other articles, and it will also keep them posted concerning the latest happenings in the bicycle world,” it promised. The second volume of Snap-Shots carried small ads for Wright & Wright Job Printers, but ads and editorial promotions for the Wright Cycle Co. were much more numerous.

A replica Wright bicycle stands on display inside the restored Wright Cycle Co. shop at 22 South Williams Street. Author’s photo.

The last issue of Snap-Shots announced the brothers’ plans to begin manufacturing their own line of bicycles. “The Wright Special will contain nothing but high-grade material throughout, although we shall put it on the market at the exceedingly low price of $60,” it boasted. “It will have large tubing, high frame, tool steel bearings, needle wire spokes, narrow tread and every feature of an up-to-date bicycle.” The description matches that of their subsequently produced Van Cleve, named for a family ancestor. The Van Cleve was a top-of-the-line bike with some components of the Wright brothers’ own design, including wheel hubs they claimed needed oiling only once every two years.¹⁰

By this time they had turned the back room of their shop into a small bicycle factory, equipped with a turret lathe, drill press and tube-cutting tools. Wilbur and Orville built their own single-cylinder engine to power the tools by means of a line shaft and belts. They tapped the store’s gas line to fuel it. The project gave them experience in designing and manufacturing engines—expertise that would help them build an engine for their flyer.

A bicycle rack on the plaza outside the Wright-Dunbar Visitor Center reflects the Wrights’ bicycling legacy. Author’s photo.

In the fall of 1897, they relocated their bicycle and printing businesses again, to 1127 West Third. Charles Webbert had acquired an old house there and added on to it, dividing the house into two commercial spaces and adding a two-story, Italianate-style brick storefront with separate entrances and addresses. The adjacent business, at 1125 West Third, was an undertaker.¹¹