Strange New England

Have you ever known an extremely lucky person, a character so unlikely to be successful due to a perceived lack of wit, money, talent, and education as to be the poster boy for failure? Still, they thrive and persevere against all that the hand of Fate has set against them, perhaps in spite of it all. These people are not as uncommon as it might seem and their success is as strange a thing as we encounter in our daily, sometimes mundane life. Such is the case with one of New England's most interesting and nearly forgotten characters, the unlikely success known to the world as Timothy Dexter. Born in Maiden, Massachusetts in 1748, Dexter did not have the benefit of an education. By the time he was eight years old he was working on a local farm until the age of sixteen when he apprenticed out to a leather-dresser, coloring and preparing leather for working after the hides had been tanned. When he was twenty-one, the unlikely young man made his way to Newburyport in Massachusetts. Such was the simple fate of a