nted and manuscript material
relating to Noah Webster.

NOAH WEBSTER.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE.

The village of West Hartford lies about three miles from the centre of
Hartford and is mainly grouped about two cross-roads, one leading from
the city west to Farmington, the other, the village street, following
the line of the Connecticut River and rambling from Bloomfield, the next
village north, to Newington and New Britain on the south. The changes in
the place for the last hundred and fifty years have not been great; the
Farmington road, to be sure, as it leaves Hartford, keeps a city
character and shows trim villas at intervals nearly all the way to the
village, but the village has not moved to meet the city, and its houses
and one or two churches and post-office have admitted new-comers so
slowly that the general air of the place can scarcely be different from
what it was in 1758, when Noah Webster was born there, October 16. The
house in which he was born is still standing, about a mile from the
corners, on the road leading south; it is upon a broad table-land, and
the wide fields which lie below it, stretching away to Talcott Mountain,
where the western view ends, are the fields which Webster's father
planted.

The ancestral stock was substantial. Noah Webster remembered the funeral
of his grandfather Daniel, and Daniel was five years old when his
grandfather died, who was one of the first settlers in Hartford and
Governor of Connecticut. The family had lived thus in this district for
five generations, as farmers, long lived and good citizens. The place
where Webster was born was sold by his father in 1790 to the family
whose representatives now live there; it covered eighty acres then, but
has been broken in upon from time to time. The senior Webster sold it
because he was poor. He lived his life of ninety-one years in a
Connecticut village, leaving it only when he led a company for one
campaign in the Revolutionary War. His square, upright tombstone stands
in the village graveyard, and commemorates the stocky virtues of
integrity and piety. He was Deacon Webster and Squire Webster, and
reached thus the highest offices in state and church which a little New
England village could offer.

Upon the senior Webster's stone is the name of his wife Mercy, who is
comprehensively disposed of as "his consort, equally respected for her
piety and virtues." She was a de