Brother Lorin seems to have been the only one who disapproved. “What does Will do?” he wrote Katharine from Kansas, where he had gone to seek his fortune. “He ought to be doing something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?”
Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years—three years when he began reading as never before.
The Wright house at 7 Hawthorn Street, the setting of so much of the family’s life, was modest in size and appearance, and located in a comparably modest neighborhood. Like much of Dayton, Hawthorn Street remained unpaved until shortly after the turn of the century, and Number 7, with two linden trees and a stone hitching post in front, was a narrow, white frame structure very like others on the street, except for a decorative, wraparound front porch built by the brothers.
There were seven rooms, three downstairs, four up, all of them small, as was the lot. Only two feet separated the house from Number 5 next door on the north side. To get between the houses required one to turn and walk sideways.
The brothers were well into their twenties before there was running water or plumbing in the house. Weekly baths were accomplished sitting in a tub of hot water on the kitchen floor, with the curtains drawn. An open well and wooden pump, outhouse, and carriage shed were out back. There was no electricity. Meals were cooked on a wood stove. Heat and light were provided by natural gas. House and property had a total value of perhaps $1,800.
The front door opened from the porch into a small, formal front parlor, but most everyone came and went by a side door on the porch that opened into the sitting room. From there the front parlor was to the right, dining room and kitchen to the left. A narrow carpeted stairway led to the bedrooms above.
The first-floor furnishings were all of the inexpensive Victorian variety to be found in homes throughout Ohio, or for that matter nearly everywhere in the country at the time—the lace curtains at the windows in the front parlor, the upholstered wooden rockers and Gilbert clock on the mantelpiece that chimed every hour and half hour, the mirrored oak sideboard in the dining room. High ceilings and the modest scale and simplicity of the furnishings made the rooms considerably less cramped in feeling than they might have been.
The decor upstairs consisted of bare essentials only—beds, bureaus, chamber pots—with the exception of the bookcase and rolltop desk in the Bishop’s cluttered bedroom at the front of the house overlooking the street. Wilbur slept in the room in the middle, Orville and Katharine in the two rooms at back. Since the gas fireplaces downstairs provided the only heat, bedroom doors upstairs had to be kept wide open during cold weather.
With the tracks of the Dayton Western and Union Railroad only blocks away, the sound of train whistles was part of the night in all seasons. The smell of coal smoke in the air was the smell of home.
The Wright family book collection, however, was neither modest nor commonplace. Bishop Wright, a lifelong lover of books, heartily championed the limitless value of reading.
Between formal education at school and informal education at home, it would seem he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children’s attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project or interest he thought worthy, it was all right. And certainly he ranked reading as worthy.
Those works he considered “very serious,” on theology mostly, were in his bedroom, the rest, the majority, proudly in evidence in the sitting room in a tall, glass-fronted bookcase. There could be found the works of Dickens, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, a complete set of the works of Sir Walter Scott, the poems of Virgil, Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Thucydides. There were books on natural history, American history, a six-volume history of France, travel, The Instructive Speller, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, plus two full sets of encyclopedias.
Everyone in the house read all the time. Katharine favored the novels of Sir Walter Scott; Orville, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, while Wilbur—and particularly during his homebound lacuna—read just about everything, but had a particular love of history.