without suggestion or solicitation, fixed upon an annuity which was paid
Dr. McGuffey each year so long as he lived. This was a voluntary
recognition of their esteem for the man and of the continued value of
his work.

[The Beecher Family]

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