Make him smile

Goshen-Among the many distinguished people to have lived in Goshen is Noah Webster (1758-1843), the nation's most famous lexicographer. As a young man, from 1782 to 1783, he was schoolmaster at the Farmer's Hall Academy, which is now the Goshen Town Hall (several signers of the Declaration of Independence sent their children to this school). The story goes that Webster had only 75 cents when he arrived in Goshen. Although Webster was here only briefly, Goshen inspired him to take on the work that would change his life and American education forever. "In 1782, while the American army was lying on the banks of the Hudson, I kept a classical school at Goshen, N. Y.," Webster wrote. "The country was impoverished; intercourse with Great Britain was interrupted, and schoolbooks were scarce and hardly attainable." To set matters right, he promptly set to work on a series of textbooks that would give children not only a sound but also uniquely American education. "America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms," Webster wrote in 1783. The first of his textbooks was The American Speller, the famed "Blue-Backed Speller," which was first published in 1783 and has never been out of print. This premier American textbook was also a reader and grammar book. It provided him with a lifelong source of income; over the years, an estimated 100 million copies have been sold. According to his biographer, Harry R. Warfel, "No other secular book has reached so many minds in America as this Spelling Book." The patriotic Webster later compiled The American Dictionary of the English Language, which documented the language as Americans of the day were actually speaking and writing it. It, too, has never been out of print. Webster believed education was essential to democracy. "It is scarcely possible to reduce an enlightened people to civil or ecclesiastical tyranny," he observed in his Sketches of American Policy. Webster died on May 28, 1843 n exactly 101 years ago today. His last expressed wish was that his writings would continue to contribute to the education of the nation's youth -- the nation and the youth he loved so much.