The Bishop's Boys (6 page)

The year after Wilbur’s birth, the family returned to Hartsville, where Milton had been named the first professor of theology in the history of the United Brethren Church. The post was an indication of his rising position within the loosely knit hierarchy. Milton did well both as pastor of the college chapel and in his teaching and administrative duties. His success helped to lay the foundation for the establishment of the church’s first professional training school, the Union Biblical Seminary, later Bonebrake Theological Seminary.

Milton would have good reason to remember the General Conference of 1869 in years to come. For the first time in the placid history of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, there were serious signs of dissension. The key issue related to the continued support of the anti-Masonic doctrine established in the Constitution and the church
Discipline
of 1841.

A group of young ministers—Liberals, as they would come to be called—argued that the church must be brought into step with the times. Secret societies no longer aroused the horror that they had in 1840. The Masonic order had grown from a membership of perhaps 5,000 during the 1850s to as many as 200,000 members by 1865. Membership in a lodge or fraternal order offered a sense of belonging and identity so often missing in the lives of Americans who had left farms, small towns, or villages for the big city. During the years after the Civil War, businessmen and professionals joined these organizations in unprecedented numbers. The church must reflect the change in social values, the Liberals argued, or suffer the consequences of declining membership and lost revenue.

Others, including Milton Wright, were appalled at the suggestion that the church should abandon its traditional stand on this issue. In time, this group of conservative churchmen would be most inappropriately dubbed the Radicals.

Milton Wright’s obsessive rejection of Freemasonry was rooted alike in his background and personality. As a social reformer, he was never to move beyond the classic liberal causes of his youth—the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s rights. He believed in, and would fight for, absolute equality of opportunity for all men and women. He was free of the nativist taint, and in later years would assist Asian church groups on the West Coast. Masonry—perceived as an elitist conspiracy whose only real purpose was to confer unfair advantage on its members—ran counter to his most cherished values.

An open, forthright person, Milton abhorred secrecy as a matter of general principle. The lodge swore a man to oaths that could not be
divulged to wife, children, friend, or pastor. Anyone who took such an oath, he believed, set the lodge above family, church, or state.

Then there were the religious problems. Milton had little serious interest in theological hairsplitting, but he was no Bible-thumping orator. His religion was, in fact, too cerebral for many of the Brethren. Nevertheless, he was a firm Christian. The man of broad vision and courage who supported unpopular social reforms could also argue that Masonic prayers excluded the name of Jesus Christ to “satisfy and gratify” non-Christians.
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Ultimately, what would set Milton apart from the other Radical leaders was his extraordinary resolve. A Hartsville classmate once characterized him as “more than ordinarily cautious, conservative and methodical in all that he undertook, and when once he decided his course he was hard to turn from it.”
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None of that had changed. Milton saw life as a series of clear-cut moral choices. The real test of character was to be found in willingness to choose the path of virtue and follow it, whatever the cost.

Most men and women lacked the strength of will required for the task. It was not the path to friendship, popularity, or political success; the temptation to seek harmony and consensus was very great. Yet moral issues were beyond compromise or negotiation. There was no middle ground. Milton Wright saw himself as one of God’s chosen few—a man made of sterner stuff, who was willing to stand up for the right in the face of any opposition from weaker souls.

The Radical-Liberal split in the United Brethren Church was a perfect case in point. It seemed so simple to the Liberals. The internal dispute that threatened the church did not involve any central questions of theology. They regarded the anti-Masonic stance of the church fathers as a piece of antiquated baggage that had to be jettisoned in order to bring doctrine into line with a changing social order.

That, to Milton Wright’s way of thinking, was expediency. He wanted no part of a “Creed on Wheels” which could be altered at will to meet changes in public tastes and attitudes.

For the moment, the Radicals prevailed. There had never been a serious possibility of a Liberal victory in 1869. It was clear, however, that the issue was far from resolved. Two distinct factions had emerged in the church leadership. The questions at issue would expand, for the specific problem of Freemasonry masked a deeper rift over the general question of change in traditional church doctrine and polity.

Those who favored such change had suffered a temporary defeat, but time was on their side. Their cause would obviously prove popular with the general membership.

The Radicals recognized the need to buttress their position. As one important step, they sought to maintain strict control over the all-important church publication program. The United Brethren Printing Establishment, based in Dayton, Ohio, was one of the best-equipped religious printing houses in the nation.

Its most important product,
The Religious Telescope
, was a weekly newspaper that carried the official church position into Brethren homes across the nation. The editor of the
Telescope
, like the bishops, was elected at the quadrennial General Conferences. In 1869, the Radicals chose their most vocal spokesman, Milton Wright, for that honor. Quite unexpectedly, Milton had become one of the most influential men in the church. The Wright family would be moving to Dayton.

N
o. 7 Hawthorn Street is today a vacant lot. Henry Ford moved the two-story white frame house that once stood here to Greenfield Village in the fall of 1936. Transplanted to a plot of manicured grass, framed by shrubs and trees, the structure remains a central feature of Ford’s vision of small-town America.

The house looked very different when the Wright family moved here in April 1871. The lovely porch that wraps around the front and down one side was missing; there were no pale green shutters on the upper-story windows. Those additions lay twenty years in the future. In the early spring of 1871 the house smelled of raw lumber and fresh paint.

Standing here today, it is difficult to believe that a house was ever wedged into the lot, only thirty-seven feet wide. This was a tight, cramped, urban neighborhood. No more than two feet separated the Wrights’ house from its neighbor to the north. You had to turn sideways to pass between the two buildings.

It was a modest enough home inside, as well. What appears to be the front door, the Wrights used as the guest or visitors’ entrance. Family and friends entered through a side door that opened into the sitting room. The Sunday parlor was to the left, with the narrow, closed stairwell leading to the four bedrooms on the upper story beyond that. The dining room and kitchen were to the right.

There was an attic above the bedrooms, and a partial cellar beneath the rear of the house. A cistern furnished running water to the sink, supplementing the pump just outside the kitchen door. A carriage shed and outhouse stood at the rear of the lot along the fence.

In spite of moves to Iowa and Indiana while the children were growing up, the house at 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, seen here on a fall day in 1897, was always home. The wraparound porch and shutters were Wilbur and Orville’s handiwork.

The city gas lines had been extended through the neighborhood, but the house was not yet connected. Oil lamps provided light, and coal stoves heat. There was a wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen.

The Wright family came to Dayton in June 1869, immediately after Milton’s election as editor of
The Religious Telescope
. They rented a house on Third Street until November of that year, when they moved into “John Kemp’s large brick [sic] on Second Street, just east of the Railroad.” Milton purchased the Hawthorn street house from James Manning, the builder, for $1,800 on December 21, 1870, while it was still under construction. The family moved in four months later.

The area was still popularly known as Miami City then, although the name had officially been changed to West Dayton when the city annexed the neighborhood in 1869. West Dayton lay on the far side
of the Miami, in a great bend of the river just below the point where Wolf Creek empties into the larger stream.

This was a streetcar suburb, the result of a classic pattern of urban expansion that would change the face of cities across America. The West Side had begun to blossom in 1869 when W. P. Huffman and H. S. Williams established the Dayton Street Railway. Both men had extensive real estate investments in the city, Huffman in the populated eastern section of town and Williams across the river on the West Side. The two entrepreneurs scarcely expected to make a great deal of money from streetcar fares. Rather, they hoped that the availability of cheap transportation would increase the value of their landholdings, and encourage the sale of new lots and homes in outlying areas to workmen previously forced to live within walking distance of the industrial and commercial core of the city.

The venture was particularly important for Williams. On February 27, 1868, he had recorded the platting of “a new addition to Miami City” in the Montgomery County deed books. The new plat centered on a large tract of land south of West Third Street, an area left undeveloped because of its distance from downtown Dayton.

The horse-car line was extended over the bridge and down the length of Third Street by the end of 1869. As Williams and Huffman had hoped, stores and shops sprang up along the main thoroughfares, with residential areas appearing a block or two back from the business district. Real estate values soared, and, as one local historian noted, “the proprietors [of the streetcar line] were astonished when it was found that from the first the traffic paid a profit on the investment.”
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Unlike the modern developer who packages subdivisions complete with finished houses, utilities, streets, and shopping centers, nineteenth-century speculators like Williams were content simply to chop the land up into small urban lots for sale to individual builders. Quite often, smaller-scale proprietors would buy several lots, hoping for a quick rise in land values; a suburban lot might pass through several hands before a house was actually constructed on it.

The early history of the house at 7 Hawthorn Street is typical. On May 4, 1868, John A. Francis purchased lot 111 of the Williams tract, along with several others, from the proprietor for $300. Six months later Francis sold this lot to Anna Manning for $350. Anna and her husband, Dayton carpenter James Manning, held the land for over a year before beginning construction of a house sometime
in the early spring of 1869. Milton bought it before the work was finished.
²

In time, West Dayton, like so many other suburbs of its kind, developed a character all its own. Officially part of the city of Dayton, it nevertheless remained somewhat isolated by the Miami. The residents announced that they were citizens of
West
Dayton. They organized campaigns urging their neighbors to patronize local businesses, and to join West Side clubs and civic organizations.

Hawthorn, a block south of Third and Williams, and half a block east on Fourth, was a typical West Side residential street. Most of the houses were newly constructed by small-scale speculators like the Mannings, or individual workmen who purchased lots and built their own inexpensive homes. The sudden availability of reasonable housing drew working-class citizens into the area. Milton Wright’s neighbors were carpenters, day laborers, wagon makers, foundry workmen, bookkeepers, seamstresses, house painters, salesmen, clerks, laundresses, machinists, firemen, and stenographers. The census records covering Hawthorn and the surrounding streets reveal that Milton, one other clergyman, and a physician were the only professional men living in the area in 1890.
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While the Wrights were by no means rich, they were wealthy enough by the standards of Hawthorn Street. Milton’s salary had increased from $900 a year as a presiding elder and circuit preacher to $1,200–1,500 as an editor. In addition, his travel costs and related expenses were covered by special collections taken up by the congregations he visited. The real estate investments of the previous decade were now yielding $40 to $60 a month in rents plus money from the sale of crops grown on both farms. By the turn of the century, oil had been discovered on the Indiana land, further increasing the family income.
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