Autograph Letter Signed (with initials WCW).  [Switzerland}, Aug. 20, 1836. To his sister Elizabeth, Mrs. B.T.Reed, Boston, 2pp. including stampless address leaf.

With Emma Willard, famed advocate of higher education for women, as co-author, Woodbridge wrote the most notable works of American geography of the Jacksonian era. But he suffered from ill health and he wrote this letter at the start of a European sojourn with his family which would last for five years – a long description of a tranquil and “quiet country life” in Switzerland which seemed incongruous for one of the leading geographers of the American republic.

Woodbridge had already been to Europe twice before, to travel and to meet notable scientific colleagues like Alexander von Humboldt. This trip was for rest and recreation, staying at the “country farm home” of his friend, educational reformer Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg, who had established an experimental school where Woodbridge indulged his passion for teaching the deaf and blind. It was an insular life, with no travel and occasional contact with a handful of resident Americans, just enough so that “we feel quite Americanised in the Swiss mountains” left Woodbridge with no motivation to improve on his halting French. He had little to do besides learning to mend his own socks, to admire the penny-pinching of his housekeeper (who spoke no English) and to attend church, where the women wore picturesque costumes “of suitable dimensions to accord with our view of decency.” It’s ironic that this quiet clergyman was one of the leading American educational reformers of his day and that, for decades after his death in 1845, American school children would still be learning about the wide world from his writings.