As time went on, Orville grew increasingly inclined to withdraw from society, yet felt obliged to participate in a continuing number of public occasions in his honor, doing so in large measure out of respect for Wilbur’s memory. He received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and Oberlin College. In 1919 he received an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale, the university where once, nearly forty years before, Wilbur had hoped he might enroll.
Orville attended the dedication of the Wright Library in what had been named Katharine Wright Park in Oakwood, and having agreed to the removal of both the Wright bicycle shop and the family home at 7 Hawthorn Street from Dayton to the Henry Ford outdoor museum, Greenfield Village, at Dearborn, Michigan, he attended their formal opening on what would have been Wilbur’s seventy-first birthday.
Of the numerous Wright monuments erected, the one dedicated to Wilbur at Le Mans in 1920 was the first. The largest, the Wright Memorial at Kitty Hawk at Kill Devil Hills, was dedicated in 1932 with Orville present to accept it on behalf of both Wilbur and himself. A Wilbur and Orville Wright memorial was created on Wright Brothers Hill overlooking Huffman Prairie, and in 1945 an aircraft carrier, the USS Wright, was launched.
Orville remained at Hawthorn Hill, looked after by Carrie Grumbach, and outlived Wilbur by thirty-six years. He lived to see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.
He died of a heart attack at age seventy-seven in Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital at ten-thirty the evening of January 30, 1948, and was laid to rest at Woodland Cemetery with his mother, father, Wilbur, and Katharine.
Ever the perfect gentleman to the end, “polite almost to a fault,” as said, always neatly dressed, his shoes always shined, Orville was also known to drive his automobile at such high speed that the police of Oakwood would close their eyes and hold their breath until he passed by on the way to his laboratory downtown.
On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.