Rebecca Smith Pollard

Rebecca Harrington Smith Pollard, also known as Kate Harrington, was an American teacher, writer, and poet born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on September 20, 1831.[1][2] She spent her most productive years in Iowa, pioneering sequential reading programs with synthetic phonics, including primers like Pollard's Synthetic First Reader, and authored children's books and poetry until age 79.[2][3][4] She died on May 29, 1917, in Fort Madison, Iowa, and was interred in Farmington.[1][2]