The lawyer was Noah Webster, best known today as the lexicographer, writer, and editor who created the first American dictionary. Joshua Kendall, in his excellent 2010 biography of Webster, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, wrote that thanks to Webster, “his hometown established a social insurance system for the poor, sick, and disabled some hundred and forty years before Roosevelt’s New Deal.”
Webster was born and raised in West Hartford, though it was known then as “the West Division of Hartford.” Based on tax filings, the Society appears to remain active as a private foundation, with a Glastonbury address.
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