7 Wilbur and Orville Wright 7duties as the editor of a church newspaper. In that city a
pair of twins, Otis and Ida, were born and died in 1870.
Orville arrived a year later, followed by Katharine
(1874–1929).
Elected a bishop of the church in 1877, Milton spent
long periods of time away from home visiting the Brethren
congregations for which he was responsible. The family
moved often: to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1878; to a farm
near Richmond, Ind., in 1881; and back to Dayton in 1884.
The Wright children were educated in public schools and
grew up, as Orville later explained, in a home where “there
was always much encouragement to children to pursue
intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused
curiosity.” In a less-nourishing environment, Orville
believed, “our curiosity might have been nipped long
before it could have borne fruit.”
These were not tranquil years for Bishop Wright. As
the leader of a conservative faction opposed to modern-
ization in the church, he was involved in a 20-year struggle
that led to a national schism in 1889 and was followed by
multiple lawsuits for possession of church property. Even
as these decades of crisis were approaching a conclusion,
an entirely new conflict developed, this time within the
small schismatic branch that Bishop Wright had led away
from the original church. The resulting church disciplinary
hearings and civil court cases continued up to the time of
the bishop’s retirement in 1905.
Bishop Wright exercised an extraordinary influence
on the lives of his children. Wilbur and Orville, like their
father, were independent thinkers with a deep confidence
in their own talents, an unshakable faith in the soundness
of their judgment, and a determination to persevere in the
face of disappointment and adversity. Those qualities,
when combined with their unique technical gifts, help to
explain the success of the Wright brothers as inventors. At