as his’n is.
In 1893, through the influence of Bishop Wright, a first collection of Dunbar’s poems was published by the United Brethren Church, for which Dunbar himself paid the cost of $125. In another few years, having been discovered by the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, Dunbar had become a nationally acclaimed poet.
That July of 1889 the paper carried the obituary of Susan Koerner Wright. Which brother wrote it is unknown. Most likely it was a joint effort. She had died at home on July 4, at age fifty-eight, after an eight-year struggle with tuberculosis.
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.
She was buried two days later at Woodland Cemetery, her whole family present. Never afterward was July 4 to be a day of celebration in the family. As the Bishop would write in another July to come: “The Fourth had its Chinese firecrackers . . . [and] Hawthorn Street furnished several displays, but No. 7 was not patriotic. Not a drum was heard, not a flag was [un]furled, and not a firecracker snapped there.”
A year later, the brothers changed the name of their paper to The Evening Item, and the year following the Item ceased and they concentrated on making money as job printers.
The printing business had been Orville’s idea from the start, and he enjoyed it most, working as hard as he could. But he seems to have found Wilbur’s performance lacking. “We’ve been so busy for the past few weeks that we’ve had very little time to write,” Orville reported to their father in the fall of 1892. “I’ve been making $2.00 to $3.25 a day in the office, but I have to divide it with Will so that when the week is over I don’t have much left. Will’s working on the press, at least he says he is, but I can see little signs of it from the appearance of things.” At home, however, he reassured the Bishop, they were “getting along real well.”
With Katharine away at college by this time, they had no choice but to get by domestically as best they could and in this they succeeded in good, even high spirits, to judge by a letter from Wilbur to Katharine.
We have been living fine since you left. Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and butter and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee. We don’t fuss a bit about whose week it is to cook. Perhaps the reason is evident. If Mrs. Jack Sprat had undertaken to cook all fat, I guess Jack wouldn’t have kicked on cooking every other week either.
About this time, too, they decided to proceed with major changes in the house, building the spacious wraparound porch. They installed new larger windows downstairs, shutters for the windows upstairs, doing all of it themselves.
Importantly, like much of the country, they had also taken up bicycling, and as Wilbur reported, they had lately headed off on a “run” to the south, down the Cincinnati Pike, stopping at the County Fair Grounds to pump around the track several times. From there they continued on to Miamisburg up and over numerous steep hills to see the famous prehistoric Adena Miamisburg Mound, largest of Ohio’s famous conical-shaped reminders of a vanished Native American civilization dating back more than two thousand years. In all they covered thirty-one miles.
Bicycles had become the sensation of the time, a craze everywhere. (These were no longer the “high wheelers” of the 1870s and ’80s, but the so-called “safety bicycles,” with two wheels the same size.) The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that “for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century.”