In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Part 2 Deaf Hartford The Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, subsequently the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, and now the American School for the Deaf, was the first of the state residential schools for deaf children that dominated deaf education until the late twentieth century. The story of its founding has been told in fascinating detail by Harlan Lane in When the Mind Hears and, more succinctly, by John V. Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch in A Place of Their Own. Beginning in 1812, Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell and Sylvester Gilbert, a lawyer and father of five deaf children, worked on plans to convince the Connecticut state legislature to provide financial support for the school. Because the notion of petitioning a state legislature to support a school of any sort was without precedent, Cogswell also embarked on a campaign of soliciting cash donations from wealthy New Englanders, promising membership on the school’s board of directors to anyone who gave at least $100. This was how the importer and wholesale merchant Charles Sigourney came to his membership on that board. Once Gallaudet had returned from his European trip, bringing Clerc back with him to establish the school, the job of raising money passed to the two of them. They travelled around New York and New England putting on demonstrations and, at one point, trying to block the establishment of a rival school in New York City (which opened anyway, in 1818). When the Connecticut legislature finally granted the school a charter and $5,000, that much again had been raised in private donations. In addition to establishing the precedent for state support, the Asylum also established the model for the residential school. The incidence of deaf children was too low, the United States too sparsely 76 Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 76 4/4/2013 12:35:31 PM Deaf Hartford 77 populated, and transportation too primitive for a permanent day school to have thrived anywhere, and it was these practical considerations that, without conscious intent, created Deaf communities: deaf people who had lived together during their school years married one another, held annual reunions, and established state associations. And these arrangements made possible the development of what is now called American Sign Language. It is impossible now to reconstruct the signed language used in the Asylum classrooms when the school opened in 1817. Clerc brought the so-called methodical sign used in Paris, which artificially combined a Parisian natural sign lexicon with a signed grammar based on spoken French, the purpose of which was specifically to teach written French to deaf children. Clerc and Gallaudet must have altered this mode of communication considerably before they tried to use it in conjunction with English. Deaf Americans had not been sitting on their hands prior to his arrival on these shores, however, and the enrollment of pupils with deaf siblings suggests a pastiche of signed proto-languages at the school. In addition, pupils from Martha’s Vineyard, which had a well-developed sign language, now lost, would naturally have arrived in Hartford signing the language they knew. In this stew, ASL was born. And it was the language, more than any other kind of shared history or experiences, that cemented the Deaf community, then and to this day. How conscious the players were of the creation of an American Deaf community is arguable. Gallaudet left the school after thirteen years with no apparent regret to work with hearing people, not only resigning his position at the Asylum but abandoning his efforts to tutor his deaf wife to improve her literacy. We know, however, that he understood that a Deaf community was in existence in Hartford a mere twenty years after the school was founded, because he turned down an offer to work in Massachusetts in 1838 on the grounds that his wife would not find a circle of friends “who know her language” outside of Hartford.69 Some former pupils like Alice Cogswell and John Brewster Jr., who enrolled in the first class at age fifty-one but soon returned to his life as an itinerant portraitist, lived happily, or at least quite willingly, among the hearing. Laurent Clerc stayed at the school until his death at age eighty-four in 1869, complaining bitterly about how the new pupils were mutilating his beautiful Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 77 4/4/2013...

Share