1896

EDITORIAL NOTE:

     Moving ahead twenty five years: 1896 is a turning point in the story where the celebration of the Centennial of the Settlement of Dayton, which focuses on the Wright ancestors, becomes the backdrop to the Wright brothers beginning to explore flight.

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    City leaders had been engaged in planning for the centennial for the last several years, thinking ahead as to how they might celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of Dayton. The occasion had spawned the elements of a local historical society to research items of interest and to brainstorm about a program of events. The celebration would span the entire year of 1896.
    One of the earliest opportunities to focus attention on the centennial was brought about by plans to build a high rise building at the southwest corner of Main Street and Monument Avenue in 1895. Anyone on the planning committee who would have been reading the local histories published over the last two decades, History of Montgomery County, Ohio, Beers Publishing - 1882, and History of Dayton, Ohio, Harvey Crew - 1889, would have found documentation that the original Newcom Tavern was in place on the corner of Main and Monument, since the date of its construction in 1798. Or they could have consulted with Daytonian John Edgar whose Pioneer Life in Dayton and Vicinity was being published in 1896. The story of Newcom Tavern was of special interest to Mr. Edgar since his father built the tavern.

    Nonetheless, at the last minute in 1895, as a demolition crew began to remove the siding from the building at the corner, Newcom Tavern was “rediscovered.” Although plans for construction of the high rise were in place, the contractor agreed to hold up demolition plans while local citizens began seeking funds to have the tavern disassembled and preserved. And so the seed corn of a historical society was sown during the advent of the centennial that is still alive today. It conducts business today under the designation of Dayton History. Newcom’s Tavern was saved and relocated diagonally across the street from its original location, to Van Cleve Park. The tavern would be the cornerstone of the events planned at the park during the month of September in 1896.
    The centennial was a time of heightened interest for the Wright family with all of the attention focused on the arrival of the Van Cleve-Thompson party on April 1, 1796. A large celebration planned for downtown was to begin in the late hours of March 31. It was to reach a crescendo at midnight when the calendar rolled over to April 1. The event would begin with parades originating from four sectors of the city, converging on the courthouse at Third and Main Streets. The parades, each led by a brass band, would be timed to begin so as to reach the court house at midnight. At the stroke of midnight on the first of April,

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exactly one hundred years after the Van Cleve-Thompson party maneuvered their pirogue to shore at the base of St. Clair and Water Streets, a cacophony of euphoric dissonance would erupt.
   Families that had been mainstays in the community over the last century had been making plans to reunite in Dayton with out-of-town relatives to commemorate the event. Up near Cleveland on Monday March 30 a young college student was readying her travel bags to return to Dayton. Katharine Wright was coming home from Oberlin College to celebrate the day that was a landmark event in her family’s history. On Tuesday the 31st traffic at the Union Terminal in Dayton was very heavy as friends and families returned for the celebration. The railroads serving Dayton offered special low fares for the occasion. Katharine arrived home late in the day just in time to get ready for the evening. She brought along a friend from school, Margaret Goodwin. Young people rarely pass up an opportunity to share in some excitement, wherever it may be found. Bookwork could be set aside for a few days to share in the elation and celebration of a momentous local historic event. It was one of those events that would for a moment crystallize time. In anticipation of the events of that night, Milton wrote in his diary, “At midnight, the great noise begins about the first settlement of Dayton, one hundred years ago.”
   By early evening the streets of downtown Dayton were buzzing with the anticipation of onlookers and out in four corners of town around ten o’clock, citizens were queuing up and the bands were warming up to begin the march into town. While the event was driven heavily by young people drawn to the excitement of the revelry, there were also older members of the community who were not about to allow the late hour to dissuade them from celebrating the homage to their forefathers. On the West Side the neighborhood sent its contingent of enthusiasts, Katharine and her friends among them. When the four streams of revelers reached the center of town at midnight with their bands playing, horns began to blare, bells rang, and all manner of noisemaker imaginable was engaged. There in the crowd around the courthouse stood a quite unlikely reveler. Reverend Milton Wright had come into town to witness the euphoria and share in the celebration of the small band of settlers who made their way ashore three blocks north of the courthouse one hundred years earlier.
   For sixty-eight-year-old Milton Wright, the excitement of the citizens of Dayton in 1896 was a reaction to the venturous nature of a group of people he had heard stories about all his life. They were his ancestors. They were the family members he had heard about at the knee of his grandmother Margaret “Peggy” Van Cleve when he was growing up

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within walking distance of her farm just up above his family’s farm in Indiana. It was Aunt Polly, whom his children had the opportunity to come to know while they were growing up in their early years in Dayton, the Aunt Polly who he dropped in on whenever he came back to Dayton on business from Iowa or Richmond. When the stories were retold over the year of the centennial by local historians, Aunt Polly became Mary Van Cleve the little nine-year-old girl who came ashore at the foot of St. Clair Street on April 1, 1796. These stories that were part of lore handed down through the Wright family over generations were being played out in front of the entire city of Dayton in 1896. Many of the same family members that Milton had seen at Aunt Polly’s birthday/reunions in years gone by stood among the crowd at the courthouse that night. As Milton and his extended family bore witness, this is what a writer for the Dayton Journal saw and reported:

The pageant, made up of four divisions and each division headed by its own band, was so well timed that all divisions reached Third and Main Streets at midnight. As the four columns approached the center of the two streets thousands and thousands of rockets were discharged from every direction. This continued for half an hour and proved one of the grandest sights ever witnessed in Dayton. From each of the columns came the rockets and roman candles, while in many places rocket after rocket was discharged from windows and roofs. It was a magnificent sight, such as has never been equaled before in Dayton. This feature of the affair was well worth all the money spent upon it. The general clamor continued for an hour during which all the bands played, bells rang, and whistles of every description in every part of the city, factory, locomotive, traction and fire engines joined. The general noise committee of 100, headed by Henry Feight as chairman, certainly did itself proud.

    In his diary entry the next day Milton made an accounting of his irregular sleep pattern of the previous night. He noted that he slept three hours that night and then the next day caught another hour of sleep in the afternoon. He had stayed downtown for about an hour at the celebration so it was after one o’clock before he got home. Most likely the anticipation and reaction to the euphoria of the night contributed to his being back up and around after only three hours sleep. He spent most of

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the next day at home and dropped by Lorin’s home late in the day. Conversation around the table at Lorin’s certainly centered on the celebration the night before, with accounts of the familiar townspeople and extended family members each ran into at the courthouse.
    Through the day a crew of city workers was kept busy downtown with brooms and shovels clearing away the evidence of the previous night’s delirium. The city was festooned with decorations of every description on public buildings and private homes. On the sidewalk in front of Steele High School, a display recounting the history of Dayton was perused by passers-by over the afternoon. In the evening the Grand Opera House, today the Victoria Theater, was filled to capacity. Those who were not able to cram into the opera house would read the accounts in the newspaper the next day. Frank Conover the veteran journalist was the featured speaker for the event to commemorate the centennial. He framed the events of the night with these words:

One hundred years ago tonight the light of the setting sun, piercing the dense forest that reached from the surrounding hills, fell upon a little band of men and women – aye children too – who rested upon the shore of the Great Miami River after a weary journey of ten days on its unknown waters. These were the founders of Dayton.
    Nation, continent, world, each has its anniversary fraught with grave lessons and pointing to grand possibilities, and each of these great anniversaries belongs in part to us who are here, because we are of that Nation, that continent, that Christian world. But we come together this evening as citizens of Dayton to observe an anniversary that is all our own. We come to celebrate with word and song the one hundredth birthday anniversary of our city to exult in its lusty youth, to strengthen our faith in its promise of the coming years.
    In these latter years titles of honor are lavishly bestowed and lightly worn, but is there any title we may give today that can compare in glory and in worth with that by which we designate these men and women of a century ago, the simple name of pioneer ? What does the word not picture to those who read our history aright, of courage, faith and hope, of strong will and stout hearts, of patience and endurance under privation, of loyal brotherhood and mutual aid, of trust in their own strength reverently resting upon their firmer trust in God?
    The years from 1800 to 1840 teemed with life, growth, development, action. In every department of human thought, in every avenue of human energy, these years were rich in

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accomplishment. We can do nothing better to stimulate the best sentiment of patriotism and public spirit in our children than to open to them the study of the history of our own city. Its records are filled with the names of good men, good citizens, men of brain and character and high purpose. The roll is a proud one. There are lessons not for the children alone, but for their fathers too, in the unselfishness and devotion to public good, the honesty, the strong integrity, the broad vision and courageous living up to the conviction of these early men of Dayton. If the citizens who meet to celebrate the second centennial of this city find reason to speak of us and of our sons and daughters as we can truly speak tonight of the pioneers of the century just closed, we will not have lived in vain.

    The program was filled with music, theatrical presentations, and high-minded readings. The event was capped with the reading of a poem that invoked the spirit of the pioneer settlers of Dayton to inspire future citizens to live with the same noble fortitude as their ancestors had displayed a century ago.

Our Dayton! while we ponder the past,
And laud the virtues of her sires gone;
Prophetic vision onward, too, we cast,
As the new century’s birth we gaze upon.
May all the sturdy spirit of thy sons
Whose names tonight we garland with our praise
Descend upon us, that there may be done
Such noble works as theirs, in coming days.
May all our pride in thee bear fruit in deeds,
In action for our city’s highest good;
May we but seek to meet thy future needs
In service as one common brotherhood.

    The words were almost a clarion call to the descendents of those bold pioneers, to do their part in contributing to the future of the community. With words like, “that there may be done such noble works as theirs in coming days,” it was enough to stir the souls of the most unaffected. It was a call that Wilbur Wright would heed when a few months down the road he would take the bold step as a bicycle maker of thinking he may have something to offer to understanding the problem of flight. With the community still in the throes of the centennial

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celebration, his fascination with flight, cultivated by a toy “bat,” a gift from his father in his youth, would be reignited by a news story that would move around the world in mid-August.
    In the backwash of the stirring events of April 1, the community was in the grips of a pitched pride in the landmark celebration of the centennial. The heightened interest in the centennial would carry on over the course of the year, producing periodic reflections in the newspapers on the settlement of Dayton and its one hundred years of growth. It all built up anticipation for a weeklong celebration planned for September at Van Cleve Park on Monument Avenue.
    The Wright brothers had been planning for some time to broaden their business from sales and repair to the manufacture of bicycles. Their timing was excellent. In the throes of the recognition of their Van Cleve ancestors landing at Dayton one hundred years ago, the Wrights would rush out the first model of their manufactured bicycles within weeks of the midnight celebration that invigorated the community. They would call their first line of bikes the “Van Cleve” and they would market them with the tag line “Van Cleve’s come in first.” Two weeks after the grand celebration, in the April 17, 1896 issue of their weekly publication Snap Shots, a paper aimed at the cycling community and a medium for advertising the Wright Cycle Co., the Wrights announced their first model:

    For a number of months, the Wright Cycle Co, has been making preparations to manufacture bicycles. After more delay than we expected, we are at last ready to announce that we will have several samples out in a week or ten days and will be ready to fill orders before the middle of the month. 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 will have large tubing, high frame, tool steel bearings, needle wire spokes, narrow tread and every feature of an up-to-date bicycle. Its weight will be about twenty five pounds. We are very certain no wheel on the market will run easier or wear longer than this one, and we will guarantee it in the most unqualified manner.

    The Wright brothers would spend the spring hurriedly getting their manufacturing business into production. A few weeks after they announced their forthcoming model, there was a news item out of

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Washington on the work of Samuel Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institute. Langley had been working with model planes over the course of the last nine years. For four years he experimented with small models powered by strands of twisted rubber. In 1891 he moved on to models with wings over ten feet in length powered by small steam engines, but for the last five years he had not been able to make one of them fly. On May 5, 1896 Langley was finally successful when, to his surprise and that of his onlookers, one of his steam powered models sprung into the air and sustained itself in flight for more than a half mile. It was news that caught the eye of Wilbur and Orville Wright who were working at developing their bicycle manufacturing business.
    Meanwhile, in the midst of the heightened air of self-interest by the Dayton community the city gained another resident. The next door neighbor of the Wrights, William Webbert Wagner, had a second cousin, Henrietta Webbert-Taylor coming to town from Nebraska. With her husband in need of a job it was good to have family connections in Dayton. Henrietta’s father David Webbert had lived in Dayton in the 1870s and was a member of the original congregation which Milton Wright helped shepherd into founding the Summit Street United Brethren Church. Henrietta’s father was a cousin to William Webbert Wagner’s mother.
    William had grown up in the family home a half block away from the Wrights, at the corner of Fourth and Williams Streets. His mother Rachel lived there as a child when the Webbert family came to Dayton in the 1830s. After Rachel Webbert married Henry Wagner they continued to live in her family’s home. As such the Wagners were close friends of the Wrights long before William moved next door to them. When Henrietta Webbert-Taylor came to Dayton in 1896, William Webbert Wagner was on the Board of Directors of the Stoddard Manufacturing Company. Upon his arrival in Dayton, Charlie Taylor, the husband of Henrietta Webbert-Taylor, went to work at the Stoddard Manufacturing Company. With his close connections to family around the West Side, he would become a familiar face to the Wright family, visiting periodically at the home next door. A few years later Wilbur and Orville Wright would hire him into their bike shop where they would utilize his skills as a machinist in the invention of the airplane.
    A couple of months after the May story on Samuel Langley surfaced, in mid-August, newspapers around the country carried stories of another aviation researcher who the Wrights and most of the country had come to know. The German engineer Otto Lilienthal had been making dramatic glider flights outside of Berlin, Germany for several

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years, and news stories with compelling photographs had made their way around America. In 1894 McClure’s magazine published a lengthy article with photos on the exploits of Lilienthal, under the title of “The Flying Man.” From 1891 to 1896 Otto Lilienthal had made over two thousand flights in sixteen different experimental gliders. He was known as an experienced veteran of the gliding game. What came next was unexpected. On August 9, 1896, Otto Lilenthal stalled his glider at his test facility outside of Berlin and fell to his death. The story of the accident drew worldwide attention and captured the imagination of the Dayton, Ohio bicycle manufacturers. The incident would seed the minds of the Wright brothers over the next couple of years as they questioned what went wrong for this experienced glider pilot.
    The next month, when September rolled around, Dayton was rife with anticipation for the weeklong program planned to further celebrate the city’s centennial. Everywhere the citizenry was engaged in projects designed to create a spectacle of celebration that would not soon be forgotten. There were parades to be organized, stage plays to be presented, musical and choral performances to be rehearsed, statewide dignitaries to be welcomed, and several evenings of fireworks to be organized. One of the most unique events planned for the week was a parade of floats on the Miami River that would promenade past the spot at the foot of St. Clair Street where the pirogue of the Van Cleve-Thompson party came ashore to begin the settlement of Dayton. Various civic organizations dedicated their time to building floats on boats and barges for the parade. Wilbur Wright was involved with one of the three bicycle clubs that were sponsoring and decorating floats for the parade. His participation in the flotilla would mirror the event which was a highlight of his family’s lore. However, events would conspire to limit Wilbur’s unabashed involvement in the celebration.
    The centennial celebration emanating from Van Cleve Park beside the Miami River was scheduled to begin on Monday, September 14. In the last week of August an event of ominous note would descend upon the Hawthorn Street home of the Wright family, an event that would have the family in a state of trepidation for over a month. Orville Wright was struck with typhoid fever. It appears that Orville was bedridden as early as August 28. The bishop had been out on the road since July 22, and he would not return to Dayton until September 4. In the first week that Orville was bedridden, just the three of them, Wilbur, Katharine, and Orville, were together at home. It was a most critical time. In those first days Orville’s temperature ran up to 105.5 degrees.

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Katharine and Wilbur stayed with him day and night caring for him the best they could.
    Kate had written to her father about Orville’s condition and on August 31 Milton sent a letter to Katharine with instructions for caring for him. They were to first boil then chill any water consumed at home. They were to move Orville to the best room in the house and sponge him “gently and quickly with least exposure, followed by rapid friction.” It was a difficult situation fraught with deep concern. After a week caring for Orville on their own, their father arrived home on September 4. The day that Milton arrived home, Orville’s temperature had come down to between 102 and 103 degrees.
    Orville was in a dangerous state and because of the way that this ailment could fluctuate in and out of critical states, the deep level of concern for him would carry on for weeks. He would spend virtually the whole month of September in deep delirium. Katharine and Wilbur took turns sitting by his bed, feeding him a steady diet of liquid nutrients. For Wilbur it was an unfortunate reminder of the time he spent nursing his mother in her declining days seven years earlier. On September 10, Milton reported in his diary that Orville’s fever was possibly decreasing a little. For the next twelve days his diary notes from one day to the next that Orville seemed stable or seemed to be improving.
    The September centennial celebration at Van Cleve Park was overshadowed for the Wright family by Orville’s illness. The week opened on September 14 with the governor in town for the opening ceremonies at the park surrounding Newcom Tavern, and there were events held every day through the week. On Wednesday Lorin Wright took his children to see the Centennial parade that came through downtown on Main Street. Young Milton later entertained the bishop with his interpretation of how the band’s drum majors kept time and how the marching soldiers conducted drills. The gemstone of the week’s events was Newcom Tavern which was opened for the first time for tours running throughout the week. The celebration closed on the weekend with a fireworks extravaganza.
    On September 23 Milton, feeling more comfortable with Orville’s condition, went out of town for a series of regional church conferences. Katharine and Wilbur carried on attending to Orville. Milton returned home on October 6 and two days later on October 8 he reported that Orville sat up in bed for the first time in six weeks. Katharine Wright was devoted to her brothers, and it was only natural for her to be by her brother’s side. To care for Orville she had delayed returning to Oberlin College for the start of the fall term. With Orville

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Katharine Wright

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now appearing to be in stable condition, on October 9th she boarded a train for northern Ohio and reengagement with academia.
    While Orville was convalescing and regaining his strength, Wilbur spent a good deal of time with him reading to him and discussing events and issues of interest. During this time they discussed the issue of Lilienthal’s demise and began to dabble in conjecture about flight and the problems that Lilienthal encountered. It was in that period of time that the seeds of curiosity were being sown that would sustain their interest over the next several years. For Wilbur, Katharine, and Orville the ordeal from late August to early October of 1896 brought the already close threesome even closer. Some of the Wright biographers have speculated on why the three of them didn’t marry in their prime years and some have even wondered if in fact they may have had some sort of pact between them. Whatever may have gone between them, it is likely that the tense days spent together in August and September of 1896 deeply reinforced the familial dedication they already had toward one another.
    Two months further on, in November, the country had a choice to make again as to who it would prefer to occupy the White House for the next four years. While Dayton was reveling in its centennial celebration, the nation was in the throes of a presidential campaign. As had become the norm, one of the options was an Ohio Civil War veteran.
This time it was the man from Niles, Ohio who served under General Rutherford B. Hayes, and General George Crook of Wayne Township, at Cedar Creek, Virginia. The young Captain William McKinley of whom General Hayes said, “everyone admires him as one of the bravest and finest young soldiers in the army,” also had made a career of public service. He voted with the generals in the presidential election at Cedar Creek in 1864, and now in 1896 he himself was at the top of the ballot representing the Republican Party.
    Milton Wright was up early and out of the house soon thereafter on Tuesday November 3, Election Day. By 8:30 that morning he had cast his ballot for president of the United States in the precinct voting station on the West Side. In another two weeks Milton would be celebrating his sixty-eighth birthday, and in his time he had seen a lot of presidential elections pass. Through those years his interest in this expression of the democratic process had not diminished. That evening Milton went to Association Hall at 34 East Fourth Street downtown to listen for the dispatches being read aloud tabulating the election results as they came in from around the country. The day after the election there was a misread sense of hope that resulted in a premature rally by the Democrats

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for their candidate William Jennings Bryan. By Thursday the 5th when the smoke had cleared, the election of William McKinley was being assured.

President William McKinley

    The day after the election results were clarified, the Wrights received a visit at their Hawthorn Street home from an enduring member of the family, Milton’s Cousin Sarah Van Cleve-Worth. Coming in from Indiana Sarah had stopped over to visit with her half sister Catherine Van Cleve-McFadden. Catherine was still up on the Wayne/Bethel township line just north of the old family farm of General George Crook and just south of the old Asahel Wright family farm. Accompanying Sarah on her visit down to Dayton was her niece Harriet S. McFadden, Catherine Van Cleve-McFadden’s daughter.
    For Sarah it was a return to the place of her birth in the time of the one hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the city that her family helped to establish. Born on Warren Street in 1823, Sarah Van Cleve-Worth was seventy-three years old upon her return to her old hometown. It was yet another personal reminder to the Wright family of their deep connections to the founding of Dayton. Sarah’s father William Van Cleve, as a boy of fourteen in 1796, led the family cow through the woodlands of southwestern Ohio from Cincinnati to the fledgling settlement of Dayton. Outside of Milton Wright’s family, Sarah, the

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daughter of William Van Cleve and Elizabeth Wright-Van Cleve, was the one remaining descendent of both original Wright and original Van Cleve family members who came to Ohio to settle. Her sisters Amy Louise and Philena had passed away in their youth, Amy Louise in Wayne Township and Philena in Bethel Township. Cousin Sarah with whom Milton would frequently cross paths, along with her husband Aaron, on Milton’s train travels through Indiana, had come to Dayton to renew old ties in the year of the centennial.
    The Ohio pioneer ancestors of the Wright brothers had a significant influence on their identities as Ohioans. Wilbur from the age of two until eleven, and Orville from his birth until the age of seven, lived in Dayton with one of the town’s icons and original settlers, Mary Van Cleve, who they knew as Aunt Polly. In 1878 before they moved to Iowa, their father’s cousin Eliza Wright-Culbertson spent the weekend with them in their Hawthorn Street home. Eliza was the last living member of the party of Wrights who came down the Ohio River in 1814 to settle in Ohio. Their father’s cousin Samuel, a son of Asahel Wright, lived a few blocks from the Wrights for a time on the West Side. Born in Centerville in 1822, Samuel was one of the members of the Wright family who, throughout his years in Miami County, was instrumental in maintaining the Wright family’s two centuries long presence in Ohio. And Sarah Van Cleve-Worth, the daughter of the original Dayton settler William Van Cleve who came to Ohio in 1790, was visiting in the Wright family home during the centennial. She was another in a long line of the Wright family’s early Ohio kin who contributed to the identities of Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine Wright.
    These connections to family elders contributed to Milton Wright’s compilation of genealogical records. Another of Milton’s relations from the Bethel/Wayne area contributed threads of insight into the tapestry of his family’s roots. His cousin Eliza Wright-Culbertson provided a template of insights into the ancestry of his father’s side of the family, the Wrights. And on his mother’s side of the family, the Van Cleves, Catherine Van Cleve-McFadden, his mother’s cousin, provided background on the family of her father William Van Cleve. After Catherine’s daughter Harriet’s 1896 visit with Milton and family, she sent Milton an account of her mother’s recollections of the children and grandchildren of her father William Van Cleve:

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Children and grandchildren of William Van Cleve
Son of John Van Cleve and Catherine Benham-Van Cleve

Isaac, not living, his children were Anna, William, Beniah, Catherine and Mary Elizabeth, none living but Catherine (Fauver).
Jane, ( Tharp ) not living, had two children, William and
Mary (Wagner).
Benjamin, not living, had four children, do not know their names.
Eliza (Ogan), still living, eighty seven years, had seven or eight children, William, Eliza Jane, Lucy, Mary, Jimmy, Franklin, Charles, and Virginia Belle.
Catherine (McFadden), living eighty three years, had two children, Eliza Jane (Allen),
and Harriet S.
Sarah (Worth), living, seventy four years old, had five children Thomas, Aurie, one name not known, Audian and Ossian, none living but Audian.
Amy Louisa, died in infancy.
Philena, the youngest died in her eleventh year.
                        Harriet S. McFadden

    From up in Bethel and Wayne Township came a good deal of support in laying the groundwork for the extensive genealogical records that Milton Wright would create over his lifetime. Eliza Wright-Culbertson born in New York State in 1811 and Catherine Van Cleve-McFadden born on Warren Street in Dayton in 1815 were both close enough to an earlier generation of the families to be able to pass on information that came to them by word of mouth. The celebration of the centennial of the founding of Dayton provided a natural backdrop to further motivate Milton Wright’s research into his family ancestry.
    In the latter stages of 1896 with the tailwind of pioneer spirit that swept through the city of Dayton over the year, Wilbur Wright began to explore his reemerging curiosities about flight that the fatal crash of Otto Lilienthal had aroused. He began to study what books were available on the mechanics of bird flight. Five years later in September of 1901, Wilbur would be in front of the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago delivering an address on the experimental gliding he and Orville had done in 1900 and 1901 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In that address he

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would describe how in the year 1896 his interest in flight from his youth was reinvigorated:

    My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896. The brief notice of his death which appeared in the telegraphic news at that time aroused a passive interest which had existed from my childhood, and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on Animal Mechanism by Prof. Marcy, which I had already read several times. From this I was led to read more modern works, and as my brother soon became equally interested with myself, we soon passed from the reading to the thinking, and finally to the working stage.

    When the subconscious is put in an enriched environment, there is no telling how much that environment can contribute to lighting fires in the mind and focusing the intellect. The celebration of the centennial of the settlement of Dayton and the Wright family’s part in it was a year long celebration that continually focused the attention of the community on a piece of history that the Wrights grew up with as a part of their family lore. It was a celebration that spawned the Van Cleve bicycle and helped to reinvigorate a childhood curiosity that grew into a mature intellectual curiosity, understanding flight. Wilbur Wright once wrote in a letter to his sister-in-law Lulu, Reuchlin’s wife, that the Wright boys were all lacking in the determination and push necessary to be successful in life. Well, the 1896 centennial was the backdrop to a fire that was lit in the mind of one of the Wright boys, and it was nurtured by an intellectual curiosity that would not allow it to go out.
    The year 1896 became a benchmark in the exploration of the problem of flight for the Wright brothers. Nearing the end of the nineteenth century the idea of man flying was met primarily with skepticism and in many instances outright ridicule by the general public. However among a hand full of learned men there was a growing body of serious-minded inquiry taking place. Enough so that Wilbur Wright was motivated to take up the serious study of the problem. Along the way there were concerns of a more immediate nature. Their interest in gearing up their business to manufacture bicycles would keep Wilbur and Orville busy for the next couple of years.

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