I got to wondering about good old Orville.
He was living in Oakwood, Ohio, in 1940. His home in the census record is listed as being on the southwest corner of Park and Harmon. He would have been 69 years old at the time. Orville Wright. He had two servants living with him, Carrie and Charles Grumbach. They were a married couple. She was 54, and he 62. Just the three of them in the big old estate of the old flyer Wright. A guy, his butler, his maid.
That old home is called Hawthorn Hill.
Hawthorn Hill is Orville Wright’s success mansion. I checked his net worth at the time of his death. It was listed as $10 million, which is a lot for back in the 1940s.
It is a huge place. Impressive. The Wright Brothers, the aforementioned Orville, and his older brother Wilbur purchased the property. And it seems their younger sister, Katharine (a sidekick to these two her whole life), convinced them to construct the magnificent home.
Although both Orville and Wilbur were involved in planning the home, Wilbur died of typhoid fever on May 30, 1912, at age 45.
The home was completed in 1914. It was then that Hawthorn Hill became the residence of Orville, Katharine, and their elderly father, Bishop Milton Wright. Orville invited some people to drop by over the years too. Yes indeed. Over the next 34 years, that great estate saw the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and other biggies.
I’m bringing all of this forward because today marks the anniversary of Orville’s death, January 30, 1948. He was 76 years old at the time he died. A heart attack got him. And then he went on his last flight.
When Orville passed away, Hawthorn Hill was purchased by National Cash Register (NCR) for use as a corporate guest house. For 58 years, the home was kept up and preserved. But few people ever saw the interior.
As a side note. In August 2006, Congressman Mike Turner made a suggestion to NCR. A hefty suggestion, I think, for NCR gifted Hawthorn Hill to the Wright Family Foundation. In June 2013, ownership was officially transferred to Dayton History. It is now open to the public.
Back to Orville.
I won’t go into all the flying details, as we all have heard the stories of the first flight at Kitty Hawk and everything that happened in their world of flying.
But I do find it curious that neither Orville nor Wilbur ever married. Neither brother attended college or even obtained a high school diploma either.
As for their sister? She married several years after Wilbur died. But when she did, Orville was pretty hacked off about the whole deal. Katharine married Henry Haskell of Kansas City in 1926. Orville was furious. They say he was inconsolable and told people he felt his sister had betrayed him. He wouldn’t even go to her wedding. He quit communicating with her. He finally agreed to see her just before she died of pneumonia on March 3, 1929.
They had other siblings, including Reuchlin, Lorin, and twins Ida and Otis, who died in childbirth. But Orville, Wilbur, and Katharine seemed to have a tight-knit connection. I wonder what drove such a bond between the three. I’m not suggesting that it was sexual, as that doesn’t appear to be it.
But they must have had some kind of pact, or unison, or mutual agreement between them. I speculate. I simply find it curious.
And so it is with life and so many other things about the world in which we live. There are things that we don’t know and probably never will. The mysteries around us. Like those Wrights.
And so we wonder.
And so we wonder.
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“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson
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“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
― Albert Einstein
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“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”
― Ray Bradbury
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The Wright Stuff on Hawthorne Hill
