From Ohio History Central Farm and Fireside Block, located on
the northwest corner of High and Factory streets (now High
Street and Wittenberg Avenue) in Springfield, Ohio. John
Crowell, a printer from Louisville, Kentucky, came to
Springfield, Ohio in 1878 to edit Farm and Fireside magazine.
The original idea was to use magazines to sell farm machinery.
By 1902 the Crowell Company was publishing a number of
magazines. Over the next several years, the Crowell-Collier
Company began publishing many different magazines, including
Woman's Home Companion, American Weekly, and Collier's Weekly.
At its peak, the Crowell-Collier Company employed several
thousand workers. It was one of the largest publishing firms in
the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. During the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the
company also began publishing books. Between 1900 and 1910, the
firm sold more than thirty million books. In the twentieth
century, the company began to publish encyclopedias and year