By Barbara S. Miller

Staff writer

bmiller@observer-reporter.com

Among its historic homes, Washington County boasts the David Bradford House and the LeMoyne House, both in Washington, and the David Acheson House in Monongahela.

They're all still here.

William Holmes McGuffey, author of the Eclectic Readers, was born in a one-room log home in West Finley Township on Sept. 23, 1800.

But don't drive around southwestern Washington County looking for the place.

It's the one that got away.

McGuffey's log home still stands, but automobile magnate and assembly-line innovator Henry Ford acquired it in 1932 for his Greenfield Village, a park-like collection of historic buildings founded in 1929 in Dearborn, Mich.

Ford had learned from the McGuffey Reader, so the Washington County native held an important place on Ford's list of self-made men, even if one of Ford's famous quotations was, "History is more or less bunk."

"Ford had this sort of pantheon of heroes: Edison, Lincoln and William Holmes McGuffey," said Jean Head Miller, a curator of domestic life at Greenfield Village.

McGuffey spent just two years in the log home southwest of Claysville before his family set out for Ohio.

Greenfield Village tells its visitors that the McGuffey Eclectic Readers were the most widely circulated textbooks in the United States, with more than 122 million copies printed from 1836 to 1920. Called "eclectic" because they include stories, poems, essays, speeches and Scripture, they are still used today, often by the home-schooled.

Ford collected several hundred copies of McGuffey readers. "He remembered them very fondly from his education in the 1870s," said Miller, who has visited the monument Ford placed with great fanfare in a West Finley Township cow pasture on Sept. 23, 1934, marking McGuffey's 134th birthday. It was such a big deal that the two-hour ceremony was broadcast live by NBC radio.

Earl Bowman, 81, of West Finley, was among those in the crowd that day. He recalls Ford's wife, Clara, carried a bouquet to the ceremony, but there was a to-do over a blossom that fell by the wayside.

"They came on a train, and they came by car," Bowman said. "They sent someone to get her lost flower."

While people might have a hard time finding the monument Ford dedicated, Robert McCleery needs only to look to the left from his front porch to take it in, along with a herd of his fine black Angus cattle.

"I wouldn't say I really remembered Henry Ford," said McCleery, 77, who attended the dedication as little more than a toddler.

Sandy Mansmann, a local preservationist whose projects have included Frank Lloyd Wright's internationally-known Fallingwater, said of McGuffey's log home, "Wouldn't it be nice if it were still here? But it also could've fallen down or been vandalized. I would have to defer to Albert Miller, who founded Meadowcroft, and he moved buildings."

Regardless of where his birthplace now stands, one can't forget a tribute that the educator might be most proud of: a consolidation of communities in and around his home that adopted as its name the McGuffey School District.

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