Before Dr. McGuffey completed the manuscripts of the Third and Fourth readers he left Oxford and went to Cincinnati.  Here he found himself in close touch with a community fully alive to the claims of education.  Cincinnati, in 1837, was the largest city in the West excepting New Orleans and was the great educational center of the West.  The early settlers of Cincinnati were generally well educated men and they had a keen sense of the value of learning.  The public schools of Cincinnati were then more highly developed than those of any other city in the West.  Woodward High School had been endowed and Dr. Joseph Ray, the author of the well known arithmetics, was the professor of mathematics there.  The Cincinnati College was then bright with the promise of future usefulness.  Lane Seminary was founded and Dr. Lyman Beecher was inducted professor of Theology on December 26, 1832, and became the first president.  He went to Cincinnati with his brilliant family.  His eldest daughter, Catherine, had already won a high reputation as a teacher, acting as principal of the Hartford (Conn.) Female Institute.  His younger daughter, Harriet, married, in January, 1836, Calvin E. Stowe, then one of the professors in Lane Seminary.  It was while in Cincinnati that she gathered material and formed opinions which she later embodied in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  In 1834 Henry Ward Beecher graduated at Amherst College.  He and his brother, Charles, then went to Cincinnati to study theology under their father.  While pursuing his studies Henry Ward Beecher devoted his surplus energies to editorial work on the Cincinnati Daily Journal.  These were some of the people of Cincinnati interested in the problem of education who took part with Dr. McGuffey in the discussions of the College of Teachers and labored zealously for the promotion of education in every department.  While president of Lane Seminary.  Dr. Beecher was also the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati where W.B.  Smith was an attendant.

[Alexander H. McGuffey]

Dr. McGuffey left Cincinnati in 1839, and when the publisher, Mr. Winthrop B. Smith, found it necessary to add to the four McGuffey’s Readers another more advanced book, he employed for its preparation, Mr. Alexander H. McGuffey, a younger brother of Dr. McGuffey.  Mr. Alexander H. McGuffey had, in 1837, prepared for Messrs. Truman & Smith the manuscript of McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book, and although the nature of this task was very different from the preparation of a reader for the highest grades in the elementary schools, the result showed that the publishers judged wisely in selecting a man competent to prepare a selection from English literature.

[Illustration:  Alexander H. McGUFFEY]