Integrated Learning-Living Communities

Cold weather kept the BEES (Business Ethics & Environmental Sustainability) close to campus, but they were able to complete an excursion to the only national park in the nation dedicated to a historical, rather than a natural, treasure, The National Aviation Heritage Park. 

As young printers, Orville and Wilbur published the first book of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet born in 1891 in Dayton to two former slaves. Already renowned in the states and Europe by the age of 20, Dunbar, who wrote in ‘standard’ English as well as dialect, participated in President William McKinley’s inaugural parade and later received a commemorative sword from President Theodore Roosevelt. 

Unfortunately, his alcoholism damaged his career, and, eventually, Dunbar returned to Dayton to live with his mother in the house he had purchased for her before his death. He died of tubercolosis at 33 in 1906. He is buried in Woodland Cemetery, quite close to the Wright Brothers. Dunbar's grave is marked by a stone purchased by Orville Wright who attended Central High School with Dunbar.

It is Paul Laurence Dunbar who provided the title for Maya Angelou’s autobiography "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

The BEES also learned the Wright brothers were raised in Dayton after their father relocated to manage the publishing business of the Church of the United Brethren, in which he was a bishop. The “bishop’s boys” then continued in the ‘family business’ but used their net revenues to enter the burgeoning bicycle business. 

In turn, earnings from both occupations funded their first experiments in flight. Tragically, for Dayton, their childhood home, as well as the last of their five (rented, never owned) bicycle shops were sold to Henry Ford and moved to his Dearborn, Mich., museum complex, titled Greenfield Village.

While Wilbur, like Paul Laurence Dunbar, died young (1912) at 45 of typhoid fever, Orville survived for many more years, living in a mansion — Hawthorne Hill — in Oakwood.