His writings were so lucid as to provide an intelligent understanding of the nature of the problems of flight to a vast number of persons who would probably never have given the matter study otherwise. . . . In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed. Few men were more universally respected and loved.
In 1911 Wilbur spent a full six months in Europe attending to business and legal matters. Otherwise, he was either on the move back and forth to New York or Washington, or tied down at board meetings in Dayton. And it all began to tell on him. In Orville’s words, he would “come home white.”
Meanwhile, the family had decided to build a new and far grander house, very like an antebellum Old South mansion in the suburb of Oakwood, just southeast of Dayton. Virtually all the planning with the architect was overseen by Orville and Katharine during Wilbur’s time in Europe. Wilbur’s one known expression of interest in the project was to request a room and bathroom of his own.
In the first week of May 1912, thoroughly worn down in body and spirit, Wilbur took ill, running a high fever day after day. It proved once again to be the dreaded typhoid fever. Conscious of the condition he was in, he sent for a lawyer and dictated his will.
One or another of the family were faithfully at his bedside. “Wilbur is no better,” recorded Bishop Wright on May 18. Wilbur was “sinking,” he wrote May 28.
Wilbur Wright died in his room at home at 7 Hawthorn Street at 3:15 in the morning, Thursday, May 30, 1912. He was forty-five years old.
A short life, full of consequences [the Bishop wrote]. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.
Phone calls and telegrams of condolence poured in from friends and neighbors and all parts of the country and abroad—a thousand telegrams by that afternoon. Moving tributes were published in the days that followed. According to one Dayton paper, the quantity of flowers delivered to the house would have filled a railroad boxcar.
Though the family would have preferred a private funeral, a public viewing of Wilbur’s wasted remains took place at the First Presbyterian Church during which an estimated 25,000 people passed by the coffin. At the conclusion of a brief service, burial followed at the family plot at Woodland Cemetery.
Wilbur is dead and buried! [the Bishop wrote]. We are all stricken. It does not seem possible he is gone. Probably Orville and Katharine felt his loss most. They say little.
For the next five years Bishop Wright continued to live with Orville and Katharine. Though no longer traveling on church work, he remained remarkably active, his life, like theirs, made notably different in a variety of ways as a result of the family’s greatly enhanced affluence. He delighted in long outings in Orville’s new automobile with Orville at the wheel, and in the spring of 1914, after forty-two years at 7 Hawthorn Street, the three of them moved into the newly completed, white-brick, pillared mansion in Oakwood, which they had proudly named Hawthorn Hill. In 1916, Orville treated them to a summer-long vacation in Canada in a rented house on an island in Georgian Bay. So enjoyable was the time that Orville bought an island of their own for further summers.
The Bishop kept on reading, writing articles for religious publications, and enjoying his morning walks. One October Saturday he marched with Katharine and Orville in a Dayton Women’s Suffrage parade. As near as he could judge he was the oldest man in the march.
Bishop Milton Wright died at age eighty-eight on April 3, 1917.
Katharine, who never went back to teaching, devoted much of her time to Oberlin College, to causes like the suffragette movement, and to providing all the help she could to Orville. In 1913, she accompanied him on still another trip to Europe, on business to London, Berlin, and Paris.
Attended by the faithful Carrie Grumbach, they lived at Hawthorn Hill, as comfortable with each other as always until 1926. It was then that Katharine, at age fifty-eight, announced she would marry an old Oberlin classmate, Henry J. Haskell, a widower and journalist with the Kansas City Star. As fellow Oberlin board members they had been seeing each other for some time and though Orville knew Haskell and considered him a friend of the family, he turned furious and inconsolable. When Katharine insisted on proceeding with the wedding, held at Oberlin, Orville refused to attend or even to speak to her, feeling he had been betrayed.
Of all Orville’s “peculiar spells,” this was much the worst, the most regrettable, and for Katharine, painful in the extreme. She moved to Kansas City. Two years later when Orville received word she was dying of pneumonia, he refused to go see her. Only at the last did he change his mind, arriving in time to be with her at the end.
Katharine died on March 3, 1929. Her body was brought back to Dayton and buried with her father, mother, and Wilbur at Woodland Cemetery.
While Wilbur had virtually stopped flying after the flight he and Orville made together at Huffman Prairie in May of 1910, Orville continued piloting Wright planes for another seven years. In September of 1910 he flew over Dayton as no one had until then. A few weeks later, flying a new model Wright “Baby Grand,” he attained a speed of 80 miles an hour. As the years passed he began experimenting with a new Wright hydroplane, then returned to Kitty Hawk to conduct gliding experiments, during which he set a soaring record of nearly 10 minutes, a record that would stand for ten years. In 1913, within two months, he made some 100 flights and tried his hand at flying a single-propeller plane. In 1914 he barely escaped being killed when his hydroplane fell into the Miami River.
Orville had hoped to fly for as long as he lived, but had to give it up in 1918 at age forty-six, due to still lingering pains and stiffness caused by the crash at Fort Myer nearly ten years before. By 1918 he had sold the Wright Company and established his own Wright Aeronautical Laboratory in a plain, one-story brick building downtown, where he intended to concentrate his energies on scientific research.
The financial rewards for their efforts and accomplishments had been considerable for the Wright brothers, though not as excessive as many imagined. In his will, Wilbur had left $50,000 each to brothers Reuchlin and Lorin, and to Katharine. The rest of his estate, an estimated $126,000, went to Orville. With the success of the Wright Company and its sale, Orville prospered far more. His total wealth at the time of his death was $1,067,105, or in present-day dollars $10,300,000. Though a fortune then, it hardly compared to that of any number of multimillionaires of the time.
If money had been his and Wilbur’s main objective, Orville insisted, they would have tried something in which the chances were brighter. He thought it fair to say he was well-to-do, rather than wealthy, and loved to quote his father: “All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”