At age nineteen, Milton had joined the United Brethren Church in Christ, a Protestant denomination. He preached his first sermon at twenty-two and was ordained at twenty-four. Though he took several courses in a small college run by the church, he was not a college graduate. Founded before the Civil War, the United Brethren Church was adamant about certain causes—the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and opposition to Freemasonry and its secretive ways—and so Milton Wright remained in his convictions, as all who knew him were aware.
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.