📍7 Hawthorn Street, Dayton, OH 45402, USA
1871 – 1914“I was born in August 1871 in this narrow white house at 7 Hawthorn Street, on the west side of Dayton, Ohio. My father, Milton, was a bishop in the United Brethren Church whose work took us away to Iowa and Indiana for a few years, but we always came back to Hawthorn Street. My mother, Susan, was the mechanical one: she could build anything, and she made toys and even a sled for us. Our house was full of books, and my father encouraged us to follow our curiosity wherever it led. When I was seven, our father brought home a little toy helicopter made of cork, bamboo and paper, powered by a rubber band. Wilbur and I flew it until it broke, then built our own. At Hawthorn Street I built a printing press in the backyard and started a neighbourhood newspaper, printing work for my school friend Paul Laurence Dunbar. We lost our mother when I was seventeen, and our sister Katharine kept the household together. Wilbur and I opened a bicycle shop a few streets away and, with our own hands, added the wraparound porch to the house. In the 1890s we began reading everything we could find about flight, and we worked out our ideas at the kitchen table and on that porch. In December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, we made the first powered, controlled flights. I lived at Hawthorn Street until 1914, when Katharine, our father and I moved to Hawthorn Hill in Oakwood. Henry Ford later moved the old house to Greenfield Village in Michigan, where visitors can still sit where we sat.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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