The Sun

WEBSTER'S SPELLING BOOK.

Written at Goshen, N. Y., While the Author Was a School Teacher.

GOSHEN, N. Y., Oct. 12.—The celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Noah Webster at Hartford, Conn., on October 16 will have a peculiar interest in this old village in Orange county. It was to Goshen that the future great lexicographer came in 1782, having failed to find an opening for the practice of law, to which profession he had recently been admitted, and began his career anew as a school teacher as head of what he designated a classical school. As his biographer, Chauncey A. Goodrich, D.D., records it:

"Here in a desponding state of mind created by the unsettled condition of things at the close of the war and the gloomy prospects for business he undertook the employment which gave a complexion to his whole future life. This was the compilation of books for the instruction of youth in schools."

The result of this work in Goshen was the preparation of his "First Part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language," in which was comprised the famous Spelling Book. He wrote and revised this in Goshen and in 1783 gave up his school and left Goshen for Hartford, where the work was published, and through the proceeds of the sale of which Webster was able to maintain himself and family during the subsequent years he was engaged in the preparation of his dictionary.

Goshen was an old town when Noah Webster came to it more than 125 years ago to "teach its young idea how to shoot," and it is the boast of not a few of Goshen's old residents now that their grandsires received instruction from Noah Webster at his "classical school."

On the site of the building where that school was conducted is one of the present public schools of the village, which is named Noah Webster School in honor and in memory of the great founder of the institution which preceded it.