John (Johann) Gottlieb Koerner

Quick Facts

Significance:

Grandfather to Orville & Wilbur Wright

Place of Birth:

Förthen, Saxony (Germany)

Date of Birth:

February 16, 1791

Place of Death:

Fairfield, Indiana

Date of Death:

December 3, 1876

Place of Burial:

Fairfield, Indiana

Cemetery Name:

Old Franklin Cemetery

Susan Koerner Wright's father was born in Förthen, Saxony (Germany), to Johann Thomas Koerner and Eva Elisabeth Polion. In 1807, he was apprenticed to Johann Samuel Zeimer as a wagon-maker. He was declared a master wagon-maker after a two-year apprenticeship. In 1817 or 1818, he emigrated to the United States to avoid military conscription.

Upon reaching the United States, John Koerner worked for awhile as a carriage-maker in Baltimore, Maryland. On April 10, 1820, he married Catherine Fry (or Freyer) and moved with her to her parents’ seventy-acre farm near Hillsboro, Virginia, in Loudon County. Over the years of their marriage, John and Catherine had five children. John worked in the farm’s carriage shop and at a forge in Hillsboro.

John and Catherine sold their land to William Brown in 1832 and moved west to Union County, Indiana, a place to which several relatives preceded them. There they acquired a 170-acre farm, where they grew crops and John practiced his carriage trade. Later Wright family accounts told of a farm with tens of buildings that seemed like a small village. John converted from Presbyterianism to the United Brethren in Christ soon after his arrival in Indiana; he was active in this church until his death in 1876. He is buried in the Franklin Church Cemetery near Liberty, Indiana.