Noah Webster's Birthplace: Where American English Got Its Rules
Near Hartford, Connecticut
The farmhouse at two twenty-seven South Main Street in West Hartford is where Noah Webster was born on October sixteenth, seventeen fifty-eight. He lived here until he was fifteen, when his father mortgaged the farm to send him to Yale. That education launched one of the most consequential careers in American letters.
Webster was a teacher, lawyer, and early abolitionist, but history remembers him for the Blue-Backed Speller, which taught millions of American children to read starting in seventeen eighty-three, and for the dictionary he published in eighteen twenty-eight, An American Dictionary of the English Language. That dictionary established the distinctly American spellings and definitions that separated the new nation's language from British English. It sold slowly at first, but it became the ancestor of the Merriam-Webster dictionary still published today. The house opened as a museum in nineteen sixty-six.
