Noah Webster House
When I visited the Noah Webster House in West Hartford, CT, I stepped back into a Connecticut farmhouse built in the mid-1700s. Noah Webster was born in 1758, the son of a farmer and deacon who believed in education. At just 16, Noah left this home to attend Yale College, one of the finest in the colonies.
Webster studied there during the Revolutionary War years, where classes were sometimes relocated to nearby towns to escape conflict. At Yale, Webster developed a lifelong belief that language and education were the foundations of liberty and that free people needed a shared national voice.
After graduating, Webster started to teach but he was frustrated that the schools still used British textbooks with lessons from a country that America had just separated from. His students were learning to think like subjects, rather than citizens.
In 1783, Webster published his first spelling book that would come to be known as the “Blue-Backed Speller.” This was simple and affordable and became a fixture in classrooms for over a century. This book gave the young nation the means to its own language.
Webster’s greatest work, The American Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1828. He believed a shared language would unify a diverse and growing country. In his view, words were tools of communication and expressions of freedom.
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