I received an off-list reply that quickly resolved this.  
I installed the aspell dictionary from pkgsrc/textproc and it worked instantly.


On Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:29:59 +0000
Eric <kellybelly@gwi.net> wrote:

> I'm running 3.0.1 and installed Abiword 2.4 from pkgsrc.  Prior to compiling abiword, I didn't already have ispell or aspell installed.  Since the install, aspell has been installed, and I subsequently installed ispell as well.  When I use Abiword, the spell checking feature isn't activated. 
> 
> How can I get the spell checking to work?
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated. 
>