Sunday, August 25 @ 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT
August is the birth month of Ridgefield’s Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860), who wrote some 170 children’s books under the pen name Peter Parley, which sold millions of copies beginning in 1827. We will celebrate with lemonade and cookies on Sunday, Aug. 25, when the Peter Parley/West Lane District Schoolhouse will be open from 1 to 4 p.m.
A noted publisher in Boston, Goodrich edited and wrote for the illustrated annual, The Token, and was one of the earliest to promote the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others.
He spent several years in France as U.S. Consul during his last decade, and when he came back to the United States, he had planned to move to Southbury, Conn.
He died in New York and was buried in Southbury. Newspaper accounts at the time reported that his funeral was widely attended and two hundred Sunday School children headed the procession to the cemetery. His last published work was his Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom, in 1859.The Peter Parley Schoolhouse is maintained as a small museum of early education and of the students who attended this one-room school from 1756 to 1915.
