William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873), a Miami University faculty member, compiled the first edition of the McGuffey Eclectic Reader in this house in 1836. The Reader taught reading, spelling, and civic education through memorable stories emphasizing honesty, hard work, thrift, personal respect, and moral and ethical standards, alongside selections from literary works. The six-edition series increased in difficulty and was developed with the help of his brother Alexander Hamilton McGuffey. After the Civil War, the Readers became the basic schoolbooks in thirty-seven states, and by 1920 they had sold an estimated 122 million copies, reshaping American public school curriculum and becoming one of the nation's most influential publications. McGuffey lived at this site in a small frame house in 1828 and built this brick home in 1833 in the Federal vernacular style common to the area. About 1860, a west wing was added in the first of a series of renovations typical of nineteenth-century domestic architecture in the Miami Valley. From the 1850s to 1958, several Oxford families owned the property. In 1958, during the Miami University Sesquicentennial, the University purchased the house from the Wallace P. Roudebush family, and Emma Gould Blocker endowed it to serve as a museum of University history in honor of McGuffey's legacy. The museum opened to the public in 1960, and the house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. It preserves artifacts including the octagonal table on which the McGuffey Eclectic Reader was designed and the lectern McGuffey used as professor of Ancient Languages and Literature and University Librarian.