McGuffey's Readers: One Hundred Twenty-Two Million Lessons

William Holmes McGuffey was born five miles southwest of here on September twenty-third, eighteen hundred. He became an educator, a minister, and eventually a college president, but he is remembered for something smaller and more consequential than any of those titles: a series of reading books for schoolchildren.

First published in eighteen thirty-six, the McGuffey Eclectic Readers sold well over one hundred twenty million copies over the following decades and were used in classrooms across much of the country. They taught children to read through stories, essays, and poems carefully chosen to carry moral weight alongside vocabulary. For generations of American children growing up far from cities, McGuffey's Readers were often the only books in the house. The man grew up on a farm near this road, and the books he wrote helped shape how an entire country learned to read.