In 1938, Sarah Lehr Kennedy, daughter of Ohio Northern University's founder, Henry Solomon Lehr, published H.S. Lehr and His School. This work provides detailed coverage from the school's creation in 1871 to roughly 1903 when Lehr retired. Although some material is included on the next two presidents, 235 of the book's 267 pages deal with the Lehr administration.

This concentration on one administration may have been due in part to her prolonged absence from the country. In February 1900, shortly before her father's retirement, she married Edward Kennedy, a Methodist clergyman. The couple lived in Indiana, China, and Illinois until 1922. She returned to Ada the year before his death.

Sarah Lehr was a student at Ohio Northern and, prior to her graduation in 1893, served as her father's secretary. From this vantage point, she would have been well placed to observe the operations of the institution during the later years of her father's administration. As she noted, she also drew heavily on President Lehr's serialized memoirs which appeared in the University Herald between 1904 and 1909. These memoirs have been collected and reprinted as a two-volume set, History of the O.N.U.