Julia Ward Howe School

Transcription

Samuel Gridley Howe was a remarkable individual. He travelled to Greece during the Greek civil war against the Ottomans, came to Boston in the eighteen twenties where he met Thomas Handasyd Perkins, one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston, and persuaded Perkins to give to Howe his mansion on Fort Hill. By this time Perkins had moved out and there in 1827 Howe opened the Perkins School for the Blind, a school that would teach blind people and give them opportunities to have successful careers. In the eighteen thirties Perkins moved the school to South Boston to the former Mount Washington Hotel and the school remained in South Boston until 1912. Probably its most famous student in the middle part of the 19th century was Laura Bridgman. At the age of seven she was brought to the school, she was both death and blind, had been stricken blind after suffering from scarlet fever as a 2-year-old, and in order to keep her from falling into the fire the family had to tie her in a chair. Howe thought that Laura Bridgman could be taught to communicate with the outside world, and she did. She was able to learn signs and became the first deaf blind person in human history who was able to communicate with others. A remarkable achievement. When Charles Dickens visited in the 1840s the person the most wanted to meet was Laura Bridgman, a prodigy, and in the 1880s when the Keller family in Alabama had a daughter who was stricken deaf and blind, they brought her to Boston because they had heard about Laura Bridgman. And interestingly enough, Anne Sullivan, the woman who would teach Hellen Keller had briefly been blind as a child, temporarily blind. She came to the Perkins School and many of the other blind children who were Protestants did not want to have anything to do with the Catholic Anne Sullivan. The one person in the school who befriended her was Laura Bridgman, the woman now in her forties who had learned to communicate thanks to the work the Perkins School. Howe worked with Dorothea Dix to create a school for the feeble-minded and he married Julia Ward, a young socialite from New York, and Julia Ward Howe came to Boston in the 1840s and the two of them lived in South Boston, and in addition to running the school they also published a magazine called Commonwealth, an anti-slavery magazine. Julia Ward Howe remembered the visit of John Brown to the school in the 1850s, she said he looked like a latter-day Puritan as he was in Boston trying to raise money for his insurrections in Kansas and in Virginia. Samuel Gridley Howe and his wife Julia Ward Howe were leaders in the anti-slavery community in Boston. Howe was perhaps the most famous educator in America, famous for his education the blind who learned not only to read and write and communicate but also skills that would sustain them through life. And the Perkins School for the Blind, which moved to Watertown, Massachusetts in 1912, remains a leader in special education.