Pike, James, 1777-1842

James Pike (1777-1842), the son of John and Martha Trevett Pike, was born in Somersworth, New Hampshire, in March 1777. Without doubt he received at least a common school education since he began teaching himself in December 1798. His first school was at Wakefield, Massachusetts, and it was followed by terms at Newbury "Newtown," Salisbury, and Charlestown, Massachusetts, in his home town of Somersworth, New Hampshire, and in the Maine towns in Buxton, Berwick, and Portland. While teaching in Portland he wrote and used in his classroom his spelling book The Columbian Orthographer, which Daniel Johnson published in 1806. The work was sufficiently meritorious that several editions followed.

Pike was in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1808-1809, preparing copy and reading proof on a dictionary to be issued by the Charlestown firm of Etheridge & Bliss. If the work was published under Pike's name, no copy seems to have survived. He is known to have published one further school text, The Little Reader, for which the certificate of copyright, 1814, is in the collection. By October of 1812, Pike's eyesight had failed him after many years of eye trouble. Apparently he was not married when his blindness struck, and it is inferred from material in the collection that he was cared for by his family, and that he remained single until his death in 1842 at Somersworth.