Samuel Gridley Howe - Work For The Blind

Work For The Blind

In 1831 he returned to America. Here a new object of interest engaged him. Through his friend Dr. John Dix Fisher, a Boston physician who had started a movement there as early as 1826 for establishing a school for the blind, he had learned of a similar school founded in Paris by Valentin Haüy. It was proposed to Howe by a committee organized by Fisher that he should direct the establishment of a New England Asylum for the Blind at Boston. He took up the project with characteristic ardor, and set out at once for Europe to investigate the problem. There he was temporarily diverted from his task by becoming mixed up with the Polish revolt. He became chairman of the American-Polish Committee at Paris, organized by himself, J. Fenimore Cooper, S. F. B. Morse, and several other Americans living in the city, for the purpose of giving relief to the Polish political refugees who had crossed over the Prussian border into Prussia. Dr. Howe undertook to distribute the supplies and funds personally and while in Berlin he was arrested and imprisoned, but was released after five weeks through the intervention of the American minister at Paris.

Returning to Boston in July 1832, he began receiving a few blind children at his father’s house in Pleasant Street, and thus sowed the seed which grew into the famous Perkins Institution. In January 1833 the funds available were all spent, but so much progress had been shown that the legislature approved funding, later increased to $30,000 a year, to the institution on condition that it should educate gratuitously twenty poor blind from the state; money was also contributed from Salem and Boston. Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a prominent Boston trader in slaves, furs, and opium, then presented his mansion and grounds in Pearl Street for the school to be held there in perpetuity. This building being later found unsuitable, Colonel Perkins consented to its sale, and in 1839 the institution was moved to the former Mount Washington House Hotel in South Boston. It was henceforth known as the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum (or, since 1877, School for the Blind.)

Howe was director, and the life and soul of the school; he opened a printing-office and organized a fund for printing for the blind — the first done in America; and he was unwearied in calling public attention to tile work. The Institution, through him, became one of the intellectual centres of American philanthropy, and by degrees obtained more and more financial support. In 1837, Howe brought to the school Laura Bridgman, a young deaf-blind girl who later became a teacher at the school. She became famous as the first known deaf-blind person to be successfully educated in America.

Dr. Howe himself was the originator of many improvements in method as well as in the process of printing books in Braille. Besides acting as superintendent of the Perkins Institution to the end of his life, he was instrumental in establishing a large number of institutions of a similar character throughout the country.