Edmund Booth: Deaf Pioneer

11 The Deaf Community

ELEVEN The Deaf Community O} AS A former schoolteacher, Edmund remained interested in the welfare of deaf children throughout his life. His interest extended to any and every deaf person he could locate in his region as well. As soon as he learned of families who had deaf members, he would make the trek to establish ties. Although he lived on the frontier plains for more than six decades, Edmund Booth became an icon in the American Deaf community during his own lifetime. He taught in Hartford for only a few years, yet he was held up as a pioneering educator of deaf pupils. In his book, The Abbé de l’Epée, Founder of the Manual Instruction of the Deaf, and Other Early Teachers of the Deaf, Edwin Isaac Holycross included Edmund Booth along with the “Three Immortals,” Epée, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, and Laurent Clerc, as a reason why “sign language will never be a dead language.” Holycross emphasized Booth’s “sturdy courage” and “intellectual brightness” that “exercised so powerful an impetus upon the welfare of the deaf upon the progress of the community wherein was reopened the harvest of his riper years and larger experience.”1 Edmund Booth’s courage and intellect were indeed the stuff of legends. His fellow deaf and hearing teachers, as well as his pupils, whom he taught for seven years, followed his whereabouts and his accomplishments through reports in the early newspapers of the Deaf community and in the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, the primary periodical for educators of deaf students. Reports about Edmund also appeared in the Association Review, a journal edited by his son, Frank. Edmund’s voluminous correspondence, most of it now lost, included exchanges with former colleagues in Hartford and other towns. The accumulated effects of his 142 143 The Deaf Community early experience as one of the nation’s first deaf teachers, his efforts to support the establishment of several schools for deaf children, his mature perspectives published in the American Annals regarding instruction, the debate over a Deaf commonwealth, and other topics, and his reputation as a deaf frontiersman who shrank at no challenge in the larger community of hearing people, earned him well-deserved respect over time. By his seventh decade, Edmund was an elder spokesman of the Deaf community, and neither distance nor the isolation imposed by life on the prairie frontier lessened this status. After his lecture to the Clerc Literary Association in 1901, he was referred to as “an honored nestor” of the Deaf community by a writer in The Silent Worker, who also wrote, “age has not . . . abated one jot or tittle the particular interest he has ever felt in the doings of the deaf world, and the throng that gathered in the chapel of All Soul’s Church a week since was repaid by a talk that was a piece de resistance of the season.”2 Edmund was later revered for his use of “sign language in its purity and clearness” and, with artist/poet John Carlin and painter H. Humphrey Moore, he was considered among those who should be included in a proposed American Deaf community’s “Temple of Fame.”3 The Deaf community began to coalesce and create its own organizations in the mid-nineteenth century. St. Ann’s Church for the Deaf formed in 1852 in New York to provide deaf people with a place to attend services in sign language. In 1854, the New England Gallaudet Association became the first organization established by deaf people for deaf people . Many of the early members had attended the American School in Hartford. Edmund was in California when these developments occurred, but it did not take him long to catch up on the news after he returned to Iowa. In 1858 he published an article in the American Annals counseling deaf people in the East to be cautious before rushing to the West. Iowa alone was growing at an annual rate of 100,000; by 1858 the population was more than 600,000. Looking back on his eighteen years in Iowa and California, he cautioned the Deaf community that “a frontier life is not. . . . a bed of roses,” what with wolves and rattlesnakes and 5-mile trips for firewood or fencing material. “Brethren! If you have farms that are productive, and are thus or otherwise well off, or have aged parents who 144 Edmund...