Authors: Tom D. Crouch
We know little of their courtship except that it was a long one. When they met at Hartsville in 1853, Milton was twenty-four and Susan twenty-two. Both wanted to be absolutely certain that the other had the character and strength of purpose required to face the difficulties of a Christian life.
Following his year at Hartsville, Milton returned to a farm he had purchased in Grant County. He taught at Neff’s Corner for two years, 1854–55, and conducted a revival in Indianapolis in the fall of 1855. Ordained a minister of the faith at Abingdon, Indiana, in August 1856, he was posted to the Andersonville Circuit, near the family home in Fayette County. It was a particularly appropriate assignment—he was replacing a man who had created a minor scandal on the circuit when it was discovered that he was a Mason. Then, in the early spring of 1857, Milton accepted a call to join an Oregon mission.
“Mother was much affected yesterday about my going to Oregon, but was resigned,” he wrote in his diary on May 28. “She said that she prayed that her sons might be ministers, and she ought not to complain.”
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On June 19, as he was getting ready to leave, Milton had a “private talk” with Susan. He proposed, and asked her to accompany him to Oregon. Milton did not record her response, but it appears that she said yes to him and no to Oregon. They would be married after his return, if both of them were still willing.
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Susan was now twenty-six. If all went well, Milton’s mission might last as long as three years. Clearly, this was a woman who wanted to be very sure of her partner in life.
Milton proved steadfast. The two and a half years from June 1857 to November 1859 were to be a forecast of their marriage. A rising churchman, he would spend most of his life on the road. There were churches to be visited, conferences to be attended, the work of the Lord to be done. The letters that passed between them now were the first of hundreds that would bind their lives over the next thirty years.
Milton left home in late June with a party of five destined for the United Brethren missionary circuits of Oregon. They traveled by train east through Dayton, Xenia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Altoona, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. From Amboy they journeyed up the North River to New York by steamboat, arriving in the city in time for the Fourth of July celebration. “Little balloons, shooting crackers, cake, pie, orange, [and] pineapple sellers, the firing of cannon and all sorts of parades seem to be the order of the day,” Milton wrote William. “And tonight they expect to have fireworks.”
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For a young minister fresh from a Hoosier cornfield, New Yorkers seemed daunting. “The military companies were out strutting about this forenoon,” he told William. “Some of them pretty hard folks—hard looking I mean.” Three of Milton’s companions—Mr. Dougherty, his wife, and daughter—were caught up in a “riot of Bowery Boys,” escaping into a doorway just as the rowdies approached them.
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They sailed aboard the
Illinois
at 2:00
P
.
M
. on July 6, bound for Panama. Milton, fascinated by the sea, found it difficult to sleep. “I went forward at night, and for hours saw the moonlight dance on the waves.” While most of the passengers suffered from seasickness, he flourished. “My berth was No. 102; my seat at table 63.” The world was full of new sights and sounds—Watling Island, where Columbus had landed; flying fish and porpoise “nearly the length of a man”; the fortifications at Kingston, Jamaica; fruit sellers, beggars, and native divers calling for dimes to be thrown into the clear water; “Sixty colored girls” carrying baskets of coal aboard the ship “with snatches of song and dance.”
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They journeyed across Panama by rail, passing “villages, huts, trees, swamps, mountains, Panama soldiers, Indians,” and mosquitoes, then boarded the
Golden Age
, and sailed for San Francisco on July 18. Milton was shocked that “not a few” church members took part in a dance on board. A Spaniard present that evening remarked to the Americans that their nation was but a child. “A very large child,” Milton replied.
10
They touched at Acapulco and Manzanilla, “sorry towns.” Milton
had a slight chill on July 26, the first symptom of the dreaded Panama fever. By the time they reached San Francisco he was a very sick man, his fever so high he almost fainted simply walking aboard the
Commodore
, the ship that would carry them on to Portland. T. J. Connor, a fellow mission worker, nursed him through the delirium that followed, when, as Milton later recalled, “my thoughts with painful vigor flew over the universe.”
11
His recovery was very slow. Milton was still “quite weak and stupid” when they transferred to the
Hoosier
at Oregon City for the final leg of their journey to Butteville, Oregon. He preached his first sermon in Oregon on August 23, then began a slow tour of the Willamette Valley circuits as he regained his strength. Milton fell in love with the Oregon wilderness during his first weeks in the territory. “The breezes had a peculiar roar in the trees,” he wrote, “and the memory of the sound was lasting.”
12
Posted to the Lane County Circuit in mid-September, he was still too ill to accept. Instead, he was asked to take over the preparatory department of Sublimity College, an embryonic United Brethren school. He opened classes on November 23 with twenty-seven “scholars.” Under his leadership, Sublimity grew and prospered. He spent the next two years teaching and administering the school, and making the rounds of various Oregon circuits as a preacher.
Milton remained in close touch with his family by mail. William received constant letters describing his life in the Oregon wilderness; there was also a steady flow of letters to and from Susan, “the girl I left behind.”
His first tour of missionary duty completed, he sailed from Portland on October 7, 1859. His plan was to return home, marry Susan, and come back to Oregon to spend his life in the service of the West Coast conference. As before, he enjoyed the trip, attending a lecture on Arabia by the renowned traveler Bayard Taylor in San Francisco before boarding the steamer
Sonora
, bound for Panama. Taylor and his wife; Lansing Stout, U.S. representative from Oregon; and U.S. Senator Joseph Lane were among his fellow passengers.
Arriving at Panama City, they received word that “Ossawatomie” John Brown had been captured by Virginia authorities following a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Senator Lane, who would run as the Southern Democratic candidate for Vice President with John C. Breckinridge in 1860, remarked, “I would have him hung higher than Hammon without judge or jury!” Milton, while never a
violent man, felt some admiration for Brown, and chided the senator for making a remark obviously intended to reach the ears of the press.
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He arrived back home in Fayette County on November 14, 1859, after an absence of two years, four months, and nineteen days. “Mother,” he noted in his diary, “almost overcome with joy.”
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Milton visited the Koerners the next day. Apparently all doubts were now resolved. One week later, on November 22, he obtained a marriage license. He and Susan were married by the Reverend John Fohl shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of November 24—Thanksgiving Day—1859. He was four days short of his thirty-first birthday; she was twenty-eight.
The long years of waiting had been worthwhile. This was to be a very successful marriage. A quarter of a century after his wife’s death in 1889, Milton continued to honor their anniversary, her birthday, and the anniversary of her death. On July 4, 1908, he wrote a poignant letter to his son Wilbur, who was preparing to give his first public demonstration flights in France: “I went to your Mother’s grave this forenoon, and laid a little bunch of flowers on her grave. Nineteen years ago she departed. Of course I miss her most. Her benediction rests on you. She was so humble, cheerful, meek, and true….”
15
It is clear that he regarded Susan as the ideal wife and helpmate. The best advice he could give his daughter was that she strive to attain “some of her Mother’s love of calm and solitude,” so that she might “Flourish like the palm.”
16
Susan was a good and dutiful wife, even by the rigorous standards of the period. There was assuredly much more to her than that, however. She was a woman with a will, if not a constitution, to match her husband’s. She accepted Milton’s religious calling as her own. Her duty, as she saw it, was to create a home that would provide him with loyalty and support, and to raise the children into healthy, strong adults with the moral fiber that would enable them to take their place as good Christians and model citizens.
Her health was never good. She suffered periodic bouts with malaria, rheumatism, and a variety of other ills. Yet she bore Milton seven children—the first when she was twenty-nine, the last when she was forty-three. She packed and moved her family twelve times in thirty years of married life—without a complaint. She was a capable, independent woman, devoted to her family.
The dream of returning to Oregon faded as the young couple settled into married life. They moved into their first home, a farm near Rushville, late in 1859. Milton earned $25 a month teaching the winter term at the New Salem subscription school, six miles southeast of town. “Here my wife and I were happy,” he reported. As a professional experience, it was a good deal less pleasant. “Some of the large scholars were insubordinate, and injured the discipline of the school,” he recalled. In April 1860, they moved to Andersonville, where Milton accepted a teaching position at Neff’s Corner. Again, it was a “less pleasant experience” than it had been when he taught here in 1855.
17
Finally, in the fall of 1860, he received a regular church appointment to the Marion Circuit. The couple moved back to Milton’s Grant County farm, four miles east of Fairmont, where they established their first real home in a hewed log building on the lot. They would spend the next four years here, while Milton rode various White River Conference circuits. In addition, as he later recalled, “I tried to farm a little.”
18
Their first child, Reuchlin—named for Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), a German theologian and humanist—was born here on March 17, 1861. Milton, convinced that the name Wright was too common, was determined to give his children distinctive first names.
Having married relatively late in life, Milton and Susan were the proudest of parents. “Reuchlin weighed about twenty pounds a month ago,” Milton informed his brother William on November 27, 1862. “His flesh is solid—his cheeks red—and he is just as full of life and good nature as he can be.”
19
Lorin, the second son, was born in Dan Wright’s home twenty months later, on November 18, 1862. Dan had died on October 6, 1861; Milton, hurrying to his father’s bedside, had arrived too late. Now his widowed mother supervised Lorin’s delivery. The boy was named for a town selected at random on a map; the parents thought it sounded nice.
Milton’s letters to other members of the family were soon filled with news of childhood ailments and accidents, as well as a surprising amount of detail on the children’s development. He was, and would remain, a very observant father. Lorin was down with a fever. Reuch, (pronounced “Roosh”), had burned his hand “smartly” on the stove, but was recovering. He was a year old when he began to walk; Lorin walked at eleven months, and was soon “running about.”
20
The Wrights were on the move again in 1864, living in a series of
rented houses as Milton moved from circuit to circuit in the Marion, Dublin, and Williamsburg districts. Late that fall, he acquired additional property, a five-acre farm with a three-room house near Millville, eight miles east of New Castle, Indiana. He paid $550 in cash, with the promise of $200 more to be paid within two years, interest-free. Family tradition has it that the property was purchased with money presented by the Wright and Koerner families at the time of Milton and Susan’s wedding.
21
For the moment, the farm was only an investment, not a home. Milton’s church salary at this point was approximately $200 a year; the family could also count on perhaps $35–50 a year in money from crop and timber sales from the Grant County Farm. As the owner of two farms, Milton now received not only the extra share of crop money but an additional $20 a month in rent for the Millville farm.
22
Like all good Brethren, Milton was a pacifist. During the Civil War he did not enter the Army or preach sermons to the troops, yet there was no doubt where he stood on the issues. “May it prove to be an irrepressible conflict in the fullest sense of the term, ending oppression’s rule,” he remarked in a letter to a friend. “I made no party speeches,” he told his children many years later, “but I, on many occasions, condemned slavery and advocated the Union cause.”
Those wartime sermons were described as “temperate in word, but radical in principle.” He was invited to deliver special sermons on the occasion of the recapture of Fort Sumter and the death of President Lincoln. Like the President, he argued that leniency and understanding should be extended to the defeated Confederacy.
23
Not long after the end of the war, they finally moved onto the Millville farm. Susan gave birth to their third son, Wilbur—named for Wilbur Fiske, a clergyman whom Milton admired—here on April 16, 1867.
The boy was born with a head his father described as being “two stories high.” Milton, a long-time amateur phrenologist, was concerned but found some humor in the situation. Later, he would tell reporters that while his son’s appearance had improved with age, it was several years before Susan could find a hat that did not look silly on the youngster.
“Willy,” as his father insisted on calling him for several years, took his first step on February 4, 1868, when he was ten and a half months old. After that there was no stopping him—“At fifteen months, when turned into a room he seemed to see all the mischief available in it at a glance, and [he] always found the greatest first.”
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