Students learning sign language, 1893. Photographed by Gauvin & Gentzel. School for the Hearing Handicapped NSARM accession no. 1990-205
I've known that we had deafness the family since I was little. My father still remembered some of the sign language he learned to speak to his great-grandmother, who died just a few days short of her 100th birthday in 1950. He said she used an older version of sign language, different from ASL. But when I first starting delving in to the details of Ruth Elizabeth Bentley and her husband Robert Tupper, I had no idea how fascinating it would all be.
Robert's parents, Samuel and Martha (Howard) Tupper, had ten children and three of them were born deaf, all male. John Creelman Tupper came first in 1835. Then Robert G. Tupper (my GGG grandfather) on 10 Sep 1837, and later on Franklin Tupper, born on 18 Sep 1851. At the time, in Nova Scotia, there were few options for educating a deaf child. The nearest school was in Quebec, which had opened just a few years before John was born. It was almost 600 miles away and most likely French. Another option would be to find a private educator, but how practical (or expensive) that would be, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure what sort of formal eduction these Tupper boys would have received, but what I do know is that John (then 21) and Robert (19) were first in line for an education when the Deaf and Dumb Institution first opened its doors. Franklin attended the school as well.
The school was the brain child of two deaf men from Scotland, who had both attended the same school for the deaf in Edinburgh and then ended up immigrating to Nova Scotia and running into each other again. George Tait was a carpenter; William Gray a tailor. Apparently there was some dispute later over who actually founded the school, but generally the story goes that Gray was underemployed and Tait was tutoring a young deaf girl (although in some versions Gray was doing the tutoring) when Tait began to urge Gray to become a teacher of the deaf. Gray agreed, the men set about raising funds and, in Tait's case, building the desks for the classrooms. They opened shop on Argyle Street in 1857 with just four children. Two of them were probably John and Robert, who started in 1857 at some point.
The Deaf and Dumb Institution, ca 1876. Here's a photo.
Shortly thereafter, the school took off. Clearly there had been a need! Students came from all over the Maritimes. Thankfully, government grants and private donations allowed the hiring of a trained teacher, J. Scott Hutton, also from Edinburgh. Soon after his arrival, however, Scott was begging his own father, still in Scotland, to join his over-worked teaching staff. Mr. George Hutton had been teaching the deaf for over forty years already, and he did come to Halifax where he worked for the next ten years (without pay!) until he died in 1870.
J. Scott Hutton, principal of the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, Halifax
I imagine that the new school brought the deaf community together for the first time. The Tupper boys certainly made friends and both John and Robert found wives at the school. J. Scott Hutton translated the ceremony at Robert's wedding (in 1873 to Ruth Elizabeth Bentley) and John and Robert's hearing sister, Cynthia Amelia, married George Tait, the man who helped found the school!
For further reading:
Edward Allan Fay, editor, Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, 1817-1893 Volume III (Washington, D.C.: The Volta Bureau, 1893). It's available through Google books.
The Silent Worker is a newsletter about the deaf community published from 1888 to 1929. The complete collection is available online. In fact, the Gallaudet University Archives is a treasure-trove. And speaking of Gallaudet:
Joseph C. Gordon, editor, Education of Deaf Children: Evidence of Edward Minor Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell (Washington, D.C.: The Volta Bureau, 1892). Also available through Google books (love Google Books!).