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William H. McGuffey House

historic house in Ohio, United States

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 6, 2026
Entity authorityQ8010507 ↗
Source-derived summary

The William H. McGuffey House is a historic house museum at 401 East Spring Street, on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Built in 1833, it was the home of author and professor William Holmes McGuffey (1800–1873) from then until 1836. It is believed to be the site where he wrote the first four of the McGuffey Readers, widely popular instructional texts used to educate generations of Americans. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. It is now operated by Miami University as the William Holmes McGuffey Museum.

Description and history

The William H. McGuffey House is located southeast of uptown Oxford, at the southeast corner of East Spring and South Oak Streets. It is a two-story brick structure with a gabled roof, and a two-story wood-frame ell extending behind it. The main roof line has a bracketed cornice in the front, and the side gables are adorned with Gothic style drip moulding. A single-story porch extends across the front, with a flat roof supported by four Tuscan columns, and a spindled balustrade. The main facade is three bays wide, with the main entrance in the left bay, topped by a transom window.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “William H. McGuffey House” is historic house in Ohio, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through William, McGuffey and House, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1833, 1800, 1873, 1836—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, William, McGuffey and House is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “historic house in Ohio, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8010507. Authority coordinates are 39.507, -84.736. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1800, 1873 and 1836.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “William H. McGuffey House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.