GOSHEN—It is no coincidence that Goshen’s Town Hall sits on Webster Avenue, or that there is a historical marker outside the Town Hall about Noah Webster Jr.
Best known for his work on the Webster dictionary, Webster lived in Goshen between 1782 and 1783 while he taught school at Farmer’s Hall Academy, a building now enveloped by the Goshen Town Hall.
Born in 1758 in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster’s mother, Mercy Steele was a housewife and his father, Noah Webster, Sr., was a farmer, among other jobs.
Webster studied law at Yale in New Haven but was kicked out of his father’s house with only $20 and was working as an itinerant teacher when he came to Goshen.
It was in Goshen that he started writing “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” colloquially known as the blue-backed Speller, selling by some estimates as many as 100 million copies by the 1900’s, making it one of the most popular textbooks in American history. Following it were the “Grammar” and the “Reader,” and later, “An American Dictionary of the English Language.”
It was in a nervous depression that he took on these projects, said Joshua Kendall, author of “The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and Creation of an American Culture.” Kendall gave a talk entitled “Noah Webster’s Legacy” during Noah Webster Weekend in Goshen May 6-7.
He painted Webster as an educated, prolific writer, a lexicogropher, a journalist, a savvy businessman, a statesman, a religious convert, and an eccentric whose obsessive-compulsive and borderline misanthropic personality made him ideal for the task of dictionary writing.
In 1798 he started the dictionary, which he continued to write for the next 30 years, using it as a kind of therapy to channel the nervous energy from depression and relationship problems he was having.
