So I wanted to call BS on the statement that 19th century elementary school textbooks had the & character as the final letter of the alphabet, but lo and behold: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/pho...

Now this was not universally true, but there seems to be at least some anecdotal evidence that in the mid to late 1800s some English language school age textbooks did indeed have this extra character.