Gallaudet Family
One of American School for the Deaf’s Founding Families
Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, born December 10, 1787, met Dr. Mason Cogswell and his daughter Alice in the summer of 1814. Realizing that, although Alice was deaf, she could learn to read and spell, Cogswell sent Gallaudet to Europe to learn more about deaf education. Rebuffed in Britain, he met Abbé Sicard and journeyed to Paris to study at theInstitution Nationale des Sourds-Muets à Paris. While there he worked with Laurent Clerc and the two sailed back to the United States together to found the American School for the Deaf in 1817.
Gallaudet married a former pupil, Sophia Fowler, in 1821 and they had eight children together. Their eldest son, Thomas, followed his father into religious studies and became a pastor for the deaf in New York City. Their youngest, Edward Miner Gallaudet, continued his father’s work in deaf education as well, by helping open the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind in Washington, DC, later Gallaudet University.
This is the gravesite for a large portion of the Gallaudet Family. Thomas Hopkins and Sophia Gallaudet, their three children Edward Miner, Jane, and Thomas, and their spouses are buried at this family plot.Credits and Sources:
Photos courtesy of:
Keenan; Gallaudet University Archives; "Edward Miner Gallaudet and His Family." Gallaudet University Archives.American History Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE52&iPin=AHI11917&SingleRecord=True (accessed February 19, 2016); Gallaudet University Archives.
