Platt Rogers Spencer, born in East Fishkill, New York, on November 7, 1800, became known as the Father of American Handwriting after developing Spencerian Penmanship from forms he studied in nature, especially the water-worn pebbles, waves, and flowing lines of Lake Erie. After his father Caleb Spencer died in 1806, his mother Jerusha Covell Spencer moved the family west to Ohio, arriving in Jefferson in Ashtabula County on December 5, 1810, and the family later settled in Conneaut, Kingsville, Ashtabula, and Geneva. The youngest of eleven children, Spencer practiced letterforms in the beach sand as a boy, taught penmanship to classmates at age twelve, and in the early 1830s perfected a writing style based on curvature, movement, contrast, and variability. He published books on Spencerian writing in the 1840s, traveled through Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio promoting penmanship as a natural means of human expression and personal communication, and in the 1850s saw Spencerian Penmanship adopted as the standardized handwriting taught across the United States until the first decade of the 20th century. Beyond handwriting, he served as Ashtabula County Treasurer from 1838 to 1850, founded The Ashtabula County Historical and Philosophical Society and Geneva's first free public library, married Persis Warren Duty in 1828, lived in the northern area of Geneva that became known as Geneva-On-The-Lake, and had eleven children. In business education he founded the first Spencerian Commercial College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1852 and helped create a network of forty such schools in the United States and Canada; by the time of his death, a million copies of his books had been sold, and his colleges had become a model for business education. He was also an early advocate of abolition, calling slavery "America's greatest sin," and for the last twenty years of his life taught countless students at his log cabin seminary on Jericho Road near his home. Persis died in 1862, Spencer died on May 16, 1864, and both were buried in Geneva's Evergreen Cemetery. His work transformed American handwriting from the rigid English system of the eighteenth century to the graceful Spencerian method and, according to the account here, helped increase literacy training during the nineteenth century. His influence continued long after his death through the growth of business education, the Golden Age of Penmanship after the Civil War, and the later revival of his methods through the Spencerian Saga, an annual program founded in 1987 at Geneva-On-The-Lake by Master Penman Michael R. Sull to teach Spencerian Script and nineteenth-century ornamental penmanship to students from across the United States and abroad.