The "Why Is Lindley Murray's Name Written In Bronze?" Story

It was an ordinary day. Reading about Roberta Strickler wandering by the bronze lion fountain in Reservoir Park and wondered why six Lancaster County men's signatures are engraved on small bronze plaques around the curved foundation.  "What do these men have in common?" asks the Lancaster resident who formerly wrote for the Lancaster Newspaper.  "And who the heck is Lindley Murray, relatively speaking?"  The other five men named on the fountain are James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States; Benjamin West, famed 18th-century artist; George Ross, signer of the Declaration of independence; Robert Fulton, inventor of the first commercially successful steamboat; and Thaddeus Stevens, Lancaster's Republican representative during the Civil War and Reconstruction.  All of these men were born in the 18th century, and all but Ross lived well into the 19th century.  All but West and Stevens were born in Lancaster County. West visited Lancaster and painted several portraits here, and Stevens spent the most important decades of his life here.  But Lindley Murray -- a Quaker lawyer, writer and grammarian who lived in England for much of his life???  What qualifies him to join the others?  Murray (1745-1826) may be obscure now, but literate Americans would have recognized the name in 1905, the year Blanche Levin completed the lion sculpture.  Author of "English Grammar," the most popular grammar book of the late 18th century and well into the 19th, Murray was as we'll known as William H. McGuffey (1800-1873), editor of the "McGuffey's Readers" that educated generations of American youth in the 19th century well into the 20th.  That both men, and especially Murray, are not widely known today underscores the obvious: those who write seminal books dedicated to improved reading ability and good grammar are not rock stars of the likes of leading politicians, pointers and inventors.  Murray's association with Lancaster is tenuous.  He lived the first six years of his life along Swatara Creek in what was then Lancaster County and now is Dauphin County.  Then he attended a Quaker school in Philadelphia.  His family moved to North Carolina and then New York, where Murray studied law.  Murray married and moved to England in 1784.  He spent his last four decades there, writing a number of books about grammar and other subjects.  Although there is no evidence that Murray set foot in present-day Lancaster County, some historians and journalists long have claimed him as one of this county's greatest men of literature.  The Lancaster Inquirer of Nov. 11, 1893, introduced Murray with this pointed paragraph:  "There was probably no writer for young persons more widely read, painfully studied and generally unpopular in the early part of this century than Lindley Murray, and it was the opinion of school boys of that time that he had conceived and written his English grammar especially too torture them."  A Lancaster Intelligencer article in 1927 asserted more positively that Murray, along with the artist Lloyd Mifflin, of Columbia, "are probably the two best known Lancaster county writers."  Beyond Lancaster and in this century, a renowned linguist's 2018 essay for English Today, titled "The HUGE Presence of Lidley Murray," credited Murray as "the most popular grammarian of the late 18th and perhaps the entire 19th century."  Perhaps not a distinction to warrant being memorialized along with Thaddeus Stevens and Robert Fulton.  But, clearly Murray had a major influence on generations of suffering students and aspiring scribblers.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Bronze Lion Fountain in Lancaster's Reservoir Park