12/05/2025
Check out the new, revitalized York County Historical Association!! Some excellent short articles goin’ up … did you know a York County church was dedicated by the father of the Wright Bros?
DID YOU KNOW: Blue Vale: The Wright Connections
In 1866, Elias Gilmore, his son, and a friend claimed homesteads along the Blue River, settling into dugouts and log houses tucked into Sections 7 and 8 of West Blue Township. At a time when most of York County was still prairie grass and possibility, Blue Vale became the first real center of activity in the county. It boasted a post office, a general store, two churches, and a blacksmith shop—practically a metropolis for its day.
The post office opened in 1866, and for a moment it looked like Blue Vale might become the place in York County. Rumor even floated that the railroad might choose it as a stop. Had that happened, we’d probably still be driving through Blue Vale today on our way to somewhere else.
But railroads are fickle creatures. They chose a different path, and Blue Vale’s prosperity packed its bags and went with them. The town slowly quieted until its buildings emptied and the prairie began reclaiming the edges.
Yet even as the town faded, a remarkable moment was carefully recorded—preserved not in stone, but in ink.
On Sunday, April 13, 1879, Bishop Milton Wright, father of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, visited Blue Vale to dedicate the United Brethren Bethel Church. In his diary, he recorded the ordinary details that now feel extraordinary:
“Sunday April 13. Went to Bethel Church. Preached dedication sermon, John 14:23. Dedicated the house. Rev. S. Smith & wife were also present, & Rev. J. C. Green. Dine at Bro Brooke’s 3 mN. Rains about dinner time. I preach at 7:30, Rev 1:10 on the Lord’s Day. I stay at Hallocks’. I observed that in this family the children did not kneel in family prayer.”
It is a simple entry—yet it places Blue Vale firmly on the map of American history. Before flight lifted mankind off the ground, the father of flight walked into a small prairie church in York County, preached twice in one rainy day, shared dinner with local families, and noticed the everyday habits of children at prayer.
That this moment still exists at all is thanks to Bishop Wright’s remarkable habit of keeping yearly diaries for sixty straight years, from 1857 to 1917—a meticulous personal record that today offers historians and local researchers an extraordinary window into everyday life on the 19th-century frontier.
That memory survives because someone wrote it down. Someone saved it. Someone cared enough to keep the scraps of a small town’s story from being swept away.
And today, through organizations like the York County Historical Association—and with the help of other local history groups, libraries, museums, and dedicated volunteers—these fragile threads of York County’s past continue to be preserved.
Diary excerpt courtesy of the Milton Wright Papers, preserved through university archival collections.
