Wilbur Wright was born in a Henry County farmhouse, and the family's Richmond years turned two boys from a toy helicopter to kites. They moved away a month before Wilbur would have graduated.
A Pirep featured story · KRID Richmond Municipal, Richmond, IN
The airplane's inventors belong to Dayton, but Indiana comes first. Wilbur Wright was born April 16, 1867, in a small farmhouse in Henry County, halfway between Millville and Mooreland; the house is preserved today as the Wilbur Wright Birthplace and Museum. Bishop Milton Wright's church work moved the family constantly, and in 1878, during those wandering years, he came home from a trip with a toy: a Penaud helicopter of cork, bamboo, paper, and a rubber band. The brothers said for the rest of their lives that the little machine sparked their interest in flight.
In 1881 the family landed in Richmond, and the Indiana years did their quiet work. Wilbur and Orville tried to build bigger versions of the toy helicopter and found that the bigger they built them, the worse they flew; discouraged, they turned to kites, and it was in Richmond that Orville took up kite-building in earnest, soon making his own at home. Wilbur attended Richmond High School and was weeks from his diploma when the family moved back to Dayton in June 1884; the co-inventor of the airplane left Indiana one month short of graduating, and never collected the diploma.
The rest is Dayton and Kitty Hawk: the print shop, the bicycle shop, the wind tunnel the brothers built to test wings, the 1903 flight. But the sequence that ended at Kill Devil Hills began with a rubber-band toy and an Indiana boyhood of kites. KRID Richmond Municipal puts you minutes from the neighborhoods where the brothers flew them, and the Henry County birthplace farmhouse is a half hour west. Every pilot's logbook has a first page; this state holds theirs.